Enhanced Logging in the Quiz Generator
Faculty and TAs have long had the ability to see what a student did throughout the entirety of taking a quiz or exam in the Quiz Generator. This information can be viewed by looking at the responses and scores for a single student, and then clicking the "View Activity Log" link.
We recently added more logging to the Quiz Generator to help provide greater visibilty into the activity surrounding a given quiz:
- There is now a log showing the granting/removal of special permissions to take a quiz, including when students had their answer set cleared for a full retake, on the Special Access page.
- You are alerted when students complete a quiz in less than 10% of the allotted time for the quiz.
- The total time taken to complete a quiz is now displayed on the Excel file of all responses and grades for a quiz. It has long been visible on the "Statistics" page for a quiz.
- The log of activity for a quiz now shows if a student switches from one tab or browser window to another while taking a quiz.
- The log of activity for a quiz now shows if a student accessed other pages or content in the same course while taking the quiz.
In regards to the tracking of tab/window switching, it's important to note that we can only record when students switch to another browser window or tab and not if they switch to another application entirely. Allowing one application to see what another application is doing would violate basic operating system security practices, so the browser can only see what goes on inside the browser. However, this information can still provide insight into when a student swaps between tabs or windows in the same browser during a closed-book exam.
In regards to the logging of access of other pages or content in the same course, this is only available to quizzes that are flagged as being part of the student's final grade in the course. Additionally, because this is a computationally very expensive process (merging multiple accesss logs that contain gigabytes of information on a monthly basis), this additional, non-quiz-specific activity can take a few hours from the time a student completes a quiz to appear in the log of student activity while taking a quiz.
We hope that these changes will make the activity surrounding a quiz more transparent to the entire course instructional team.