Yale Center for Teaching and Learning

Exam / Assessment Tools

Educational technology tools can be used to streamline exams and assessments.  Whether the exam is standard research/essay style exam or a multi-question exam multiple-choice style exam, there are tools that can be used to streamline collection, grading, and feedback. Regardless of what tools you use, mapping your course exams to your course learning objectives and providing as much information as possible to your students about grading, expectations, collaboration options, guidelines/rules, etc will help make your students more successful.  When using a new tool for the first time, it is advisable to have a low or no-stakes practice version of the exam ahead of time so that students can practice using the tools beforehand.  

Examples

  • Canvas Assignments - Canvas Assignments is a native Canvas tool that allows instructors to collect and score student work for grading.
    • Turnitin - Turnitin integrates with Canvas Assignments to compare student papers against a wide range of sources, to generate a report highlighting passages in the submitted paper that have phrasing similar to published material.
       
  • Canvas Quizzes - Canvas Quizzes is a Canvas native tool where instructors can add multiple questions to a single quiz.  Question types can contain auto-scored question (multiple choice, multiple select, true/false, ranking, etc…) and manually-scored questions (fill in the blanks, essay/short answers, etc…).
    • Respondus Lockdown Browser - Respondus LockDown Browser is a custom browser that locks down a student’s testing environment. When used, students must download the browser in order to take a Canvas Quizzes in which an instructor requires a lockdown environment. LockDown Browser prevents students from browsing other sites on the internet and from opening other programs on their computer.
       
  • GradeScope - Gradescope is a tool designed to streamline and standardize paper-based, digital, and code assignments. It supports problem sets and projects as well as worksheets, quizzes, exams, and papers.