Assessments – Part V: Randomization, Question Pools and Other Strategic Options

Before we get into Strategic Options for Assessments, if you are unfamiliar with Litmos Assessments, I would recommend checking out the past posts in this series:

Litmos offers a handful of settings to help avoid learners from sharing and retaining information about Assessments that may skew the Assessment’s effectiveness.   All these options can be set in each of the  Assessment’s settings and can be found by:

  1. Navigate to the Content sub tab of the course containing the Assessment.
  2. Select the Assessment title to access the Assessment Editor.
  3. Select Edit Settings from the top of the Assessment Editor.

Show Questions in Random Order

When “Show Questions in Random Order” is selected, all questions will appear in an unpredictable order.

This option can be helpful if you have many questions or similar questions and answers.  In addition, if you allow learners to take the course more than once, using this feature will create a new assessment experience without needing to create a Question Pool.

Use Question Pool

When “Use Question Pool” is selected, you have the option to have as many questions randomly chosen from all questions to make up each individual assessment.  By default, Show Questions in Random Order will be enabled as well and cannot be turned off.

This option can be helpful to keep learners from sharing questions they remember or if they need to take the assessment again, this feature forces them to answer a new, or nearly new, set of questions.  This causes the assessment to retain the same level of difficulty each time the assessment is taken.

Lock Assessment

When Lock Assessment and a number of attempts is set, the learner will only be able to access and submit their answers as many times as attempts allowed.  Once this number is reached, an administrator will need to unlock the assessment to allow the learner to retake the assessment.

This option may be helpful to keep users from carelessly answering questions until they have passed.

Time Limit

When a time limit is set, once a learner exceeds the time limit they will be ejected from the assessment and told that they have ran out of time.

This option can be helpful to discourage users from looking up answers or taking an exceedingly long time to answer the questions.  To enhance the strength of this option, it is generally set with the Lock Assessment setting to keep users from accessing the system even if they have reached their maximum attempts.

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