WebCT Quiz Tool

Quizzes and exams are the same thing as far as WebCT is concerned. Whether your instructor calls it a quiz or an exam usually depends on how much it’s worth or the psychology involved.

Clicking on the Quiz link in an Action Menu or clicking on the Quiz link as an icon or on the Course Menu will take you to a list of quizzes that are available for taking.

Take a good look at the information here. Note the columns listing the Quiz Titles, Availability, Duration, and Points.

Active quizzes – quizzes available to you for taking – are underlined (i.e. they are active links). Unavailable quizzes cannot be accessed. Your instructor sets the availability of quizzes over particular dates and times; that information appears in the Availability.

Quiz duration differs from Availability in one very important way: once you start a quiz. Availability only indicates the time period during which you may start an quiz; duration limits you to a specific number of minutes or hours during which you must complete the quiz once started.

Quiz points are listed next to Duration, where you may find the maximum possible points and your score(s), if you have taken any quizzes.

When you click on an Active Quiz (or if you access a quiz directly as a link within a Content Module), you will be taken directly to the Quiz page, which looks something like this:

The beginning of a quiz contains any instructions from your instructor. Read them carefully. In the upper right hand corner of a quiz is a timeclock that gives you Time Remaining and a question indicator box listing Answered and Unanswered Questions. This box also lets you know how many questions there are in the quiz; in this case, ten questions.

While you can’t see it in this example, the timeclock is color coded: green indicates you’ve just started the quiz, blue indicates that you’re about halfway through and red indicates that you better finish soon! It’s not a good idea to push the timeclock. Regardless of when you think you may have started a quiz, the timeclock never lies. Finish a minute or two ahead of time just to be sure you get your quiz in on time.

Answering questions in WebCT is a two-step process:

1)      selecting the answer

2)      clicking on Save Answer.

Your answer is not saved until you click Save Answer. When you successfully save an answer, the question indicators in the question tracking box in the upper right-hand corner changes shape and color. Unanswered questions are indicated as red circles, answered questions turn into green stars, as shown here.

When you have answered all the questions and your question indicator box is filled with stars, you should click Finish, which submits your quiz for grading.

You will be prompted to confirm that you want to submit the quiz. If you are truly finished (or if time is running thin), then click OK.

When you have successfully submitted a quiz, you will see a screen similar to this:

If your instructor has set up your quiz to be automatically graded, then you definitely should click on View Results. If you don’t click on View Results, your exam may not be graded immediately and your score may not appear in your Student Record.

Rest assured that if you see this screen, your exam was submitted. Whether it gets graded immediately or not depends on a number of factors. Sometimes quizzes don’t get graded until the instructor manually grades them. If you don’t see your score and think you should, just contact your instructor. He or she will be happy to help.

Please note that the above description of quizzes is quite general. There are a myriad of choices that an instructor can make to deliver a particular quiz. The important thing is to read carefully the instructions for each exam and when in doubt, contact your instructor.