Assessments with Random Questions

To create an assessment in Blackboard that randomly selects a number of questions to administer from a larger question pool, you must set up a Question Set. For instance, say you want each student to receive a different set of 20 questions, selected randomly from a pool of 50 questions. You might want to do this in order to make cheating more difficult, or you might want students to use this feature as a self-test option. Either way, the solution is to use a Question Set when you FIRST set up the assessment.

Begin with a blank assessment. Choose Add to Assessment > Question Set. Select the questions you would like to be in the question pool and click Add Selected at the bottom of the screen. Now choose how many questions you want to appear on the test using the Select drop-down box at the top of the screen. Fill in how many points each question will be worth. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on the Update Total button. Be sure that the new total is correct. For instance, in our example you would choose 20 in the Select drop-down box. If you then chose 5 points for each question and clicked Update Total, the new total should be 100 points. If you want to add more questions to the pool later, use the Add Question Alternates button at the bottom of the screen.

If you already have questions in an assessment, you will need to remove them and then add them back using the Question Set feature.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for this tip.