Exams: Faculty Information
Exam Administration
Exams administered by the Registrar’s Office are given in full via ExamSoft, i.e., questions and answers will be delivered and collected electronically.
Self-Scheduled in-persons exam will begin between 9:30 – 10 am any day of the self-scheduled period once a student has stopped by Exam Central (Worrell 1106) to check-in and been directed to an exam room.
Students are expected to begin scheduled online exams between 9 am – 12 noon on the scheduled day as listed on the exam schedule.
Students are expected to begin a self-scheduled online exams between 9 am – 12 noon any day of the self-scheduled period.
Additional Information
Please familiarize yourself with the Exam Policies and Rules for Students.
Exam Questionnaire
For exams administered through the Registrar’s Office, you will need to fill out the Exam Administration Questionnaire for each exam you are giving.
This form collects several key details for facilitating your exam as well as allows you to attach your final exam packet; a one stop shop to provide us with everything our office requires to administer your exam properly.
Deadlines
Questionnaires with exam packets for all exams (scheduled and self-scheduled) administered by the Registrar’s Office will be due April 9 at 8 a.m.
Formatting Considerations When Questions Are Delivered in ExamSoft Examplify
To better facilitate the production of exams and to aid in the formatting for electronic distribution, we ask that you format accordingly:
Exam Instructions
All exam instructions should be included together at the beginning of the submitted document. Those should be combined at the start of the document and not as a lead-in for each part of the exam. Exam instructions are attached as a separate document from the questions.
Essay Questions
Long question prompts (fact patterns) should be broken into a question and an appendix of the facts. Though it is not an exact science, our general rule for when to break out the content into a separate attachment is when that content is longer than 3/4 to a page of typed text. As a point of reference, based on double-spaced type on 8.5×11 paper with 1-inch margins, 1 page would be approximately 1800 characters.
The appendix information should be moved to the end of the document, after all of the questions, and the question text should reference the appropriate appendix. When built in ExamSoft Examplify the fact pattern will be included as the attachment available in the PDF viewer and the question will be above the response area. Here is an example of how a question should be structured in your submission.
- Question 9 – Please refer to the fact pattern in Appendix A for this question.
Discuss the possible tort liability of (1) Brittney and (2) Davidson on these facts. - Appendix A (moved to the end of the document) – Brittney went to Soft Spot Cafe looking for work. Davidson, the sole owner and manager of the store hired Brittney on the spot to work in general maintenance. Continue with the rest of the fact pattern.
This format for essay submission has the following benefits:
- The shorter exam question will allow for a larger text area for the student response
- The question will clearly reference additional source material to reduce the chances that students will miss this material
- The information will formatted for how the information needs to be put into ExamSoft Examplify. This will reduce the risk of data entry issues
Multiple-Choice Questions
ExamSoft will grade the multiple choice questions so the Registrar’s Office will need to input the correct answer. Please provide the answer key to your multiple-choice questions as a separate file. By providing this as a separate file, it will reduce the risk of this material being printed and provided to the students.
Multiple choice questions are built into ExamSoft with an identifying phrase. That way you can re-use the questions in the future with much less work for everyone. That is, you can get the question about Mary & Jose in Vermont created this semester, and ask next year to make Question 4 the one about Mary & Jose in Vermont. The identifying phrase for each question will be more effective and efficient if it comes from you and not assigned by the Registrar’s Office.
Common questions are included in select courses as a way to assess student progress in attaining knowledge and understanding of core areas of substantive and procedural law. As of Fall 2024, the courses are the following: Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law I, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, and Torts. It is recommended that faculty submit a minimum of five common questions per course. When submitting those common questions to be built in ExamSoft, please designate that this is a common MCQ for your class.
Proof Copy
The Registrar’s Office will email you a proof copy of your exam for your assurance that everything has been properly created. Please give that email your careful attention as soon as possible so that exams can be completed.
At the top of your proof copy, you’ll see a statement about the total points possible. The total number of points possible is tied to the number of questions in the exam (each question is set to have a weight of 1 in Examplify) and not the actual total points possible. Students do not see the total points possible of the exam, either in the software or via a printout of the exam.
How ExamSoft Examplify Works
When time is up, students cannot continue to work on the exam. This is the feature of ExamSoft Examplify that we most need with our remote exams.
Students afforded extra time on exams will have the extra time built into their exams.
ExamSoft Examplify automatically gives students a five-minute warning (students may set up additional warnings). The time remaining is displayed at the top of the screen.
You choose the mode for the exam. Remember, it is impossible for us to know what materials students use with online exams; students are particularly worried about this form of cheating. One way we have attempted to alleviate that concern is by asking that all online exams be completely open-book and open-Internet, i.e., Open+Computer & Internet. That takes off the table perhaps the easiest way to make poor choices.
- Closed: students cannot access the Internet or any files on their computers
- Open + Computer: students can access files on their computer
- Open + Computer & Internet: students can access files on their computer and the Internet. We cannot limit what websites students can access.
You can choose whether to allow students to cut/copy/paste for the two open modes; with the closed mode, cut/copy/paste is automatically enabled and students can cut/copy/paste only within the exam answer itself and cannot pull in content from outside sources.
In an open mode exam, you can restrict students from being able to cut/copy/paste from their exam answer, computer, and the Internet. This is either on or off with the open modes. If you choose to turn cut/copy/paste off, students cannot cut/copy/paste within their exam answers either.
ExamSoft Examplify can be set with character limits for each question.
Once a student reaches the character limit for that question, the student cannot add another character until deleting a character.
Character conversions, based on double-spaced type on 8.5×11 paper with 1-inch margins:
- 1 page = 1800 characters
- 1 line = 74 characters
- 1 word = 6 characters
If you are setting character limits for each question, use these numbers to set your limits. You will need to multiply; so you can write “x” number of characters for each question. You can give students the conversion information.
At the start of the exam, students will be asked to affirm that they will follow the Honor Code and exam instructions.
All exams come preloaded with a calculator.