Force Completion on Assessments

Force Completion is a checkbox available when setting up a new test or quiz in Blackboard. Force Completion on tests and quizzes is fundamentally a bad idea.

What does Force Completion do?
Force completion means that the assessment will only be displayed to the student once. Any attempt to view the assessment a second time will result in an error that only the Instructor can clear. The intention of Force Completion is presumably to prevent students from looking at the test, showing it to a friend, studying the questions, then coming back to the test later. However, it fails at this intention.

Why is Force Completion Bad?
Force Completion means that the assessment can never be shown to the same student twice for any reason. But there are dozens of valid reasons a student may need to view the same assessment twice. If anything is wrong with a student's network connection, Blackboard, Shibboleth, their web browser, various web browser plugins, or several other conditions when the assessment is submitted, the assessment will not reach Blackboard, and they will be redirected to the assessment. Since they've already seen it once, they will be told they cannot attempt it again, and their answers will never be submitted. They will ask you to reset the test for them, so you will need some policy for your course to deal with that, and sort out the legitimate errors from the students who purposely failed to submit the test to gain some sort of extension.

You may think that Force Completion sets some kind of time limit on tests, preventing a student from taking several hours to finish the test. However, if they can keep up some background activity in Blackboard, they can stay logged into the same session with the same test indefinitely.

What should you use instead? Use the Set timer option instead. The Set timer option starts a clock from when they first open the test. The clock is on the Blackboard server, and continues to count regardless of whether they still have the test open. They may open and close the test as many times as they want, but only have a limited time from when they first open the test. When they submit the test, you will see a time-stamp with the test that shows exactly how long they took to take the test. One caveat is that while the expected completion time does show up on the student copy of the test, there is nothing to prevent students from turning in the test after the timer has expired, and there is no obvious flagging of expired tests while you are grading them. You will have to glance at each time-stamp to make sure they are under the limit, or just a grace period over the limit.

Limitations No purely online assessment system can prevent all forms of cheating. Unless you are giving the test as a proctored computer lab test, you should consider Blackboard assessments tantamount to a take-home exam. If you are not comfortable with take-home exams, you should not be using Blackboard for assessments.

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