More Information on Quest

Paul McCord is our department’s Quest expert and can be contacted for questions/problems encountered with the system. Listed below are copies, most directly from Paul’s emails, of the more recent issues/changes to the system.

Pending Enrollments If you see that you have "pending enrollments" and you click the prompt you will see a list of students who have requested to get into your course.

• If you answer "yes" the student is in and will be on the roster and have access.
• If you answer "no" then the student is pushed into your course's "deleted or denied enrollments" page. You get there via your course's "Manage Students" page. If you ever "delete" or "deny" a student from your roster, you CAN get them back via the "Manage Students" page and then "Approve Enrollments". Quest also checks periodically with the registrar and will automatically put students with Q-drops or withdrawls in this area also - meaning, they no longer have Quest access after they Q-drop or withdraw.

Creating Assignments When creating an assignment, you can now use drag-and-drop to re- order your questions. Just click and hold on the row with said question and drag it to its new position in the listing.

Printing assignments (usually exams or quizzes to be answered via bubblesheets) After you have PUBLISHED an assignment, a left-menu margin item appears: "Print Assignment". Click it and you have a page that gives you some choices:

• the simple "Print" button: What this SHOULD be called is "Download a PDF version of the Assignment". If your assignment is a bubblesheet assignment (exam) then the entire exam (all versions) will download to your computer as a pdf file. THIS is the version to view if you picked any numerical problems (answered online via the student entering an actual number) and you want to see how Quest randomized the choices. This IS what the printed version will look like. If you don't like it - start over. You can't UNpublish, but you can create as many assignments and delete as many as you want.
• the other button... "UT Copy Center options...":
  • THIS is the one to actually send the job over to the print center and have them print them and deliver them to WEL 2.212. After you click this button you will enter some information (name, phone, time you want it delivered...), and then SUBMIT. Now your exam should be on its way to getting printed, although it is always best to check and follow-up early before your exam.
  • Quest now allows you to choose how many extra copies you want printed for your exams/quizzes. Before you publish your exam you will get this question. Enter in the number of EXTRA exams you want- the number above and beyond your total enrollment. Do NOT enter the total number you want, as it will print your enrollment, plus that total. Beware, Quest may be defaulting to your class enrollment if you do not enter in a number in which case you will get double the amount needed. So if you want 50 extra make sure you type in 50, etc.

Statistical Information

• Assignment: Click on an assignment's “Class Average” in the assignment listing and you'll get a bar-graph of the grade distribution for that assignment. You will also get class average, median, and standard deviation (both counting and not-counting zeros in the statistics).


• Questions:
You also get a bar graph on individual questions - called “class success”. The bar graph shows the breakdown of how the point values were distributed on the question. Looking at the distribution you can see how many students got it right on their first guess, second guess, etc... Also note that all questions now have performance information available when you chose the question while building the assignment. This is a system-wide statistical count on that question as it performed on bubbled assignments (exams most likely). In the future Quest should be able to give you a projected class average for an assignment based on these numbers.

Cheating
A potential method of cheating on bubblesheet exams: Quest does NOT check for duplicate version numbers. Therefore, any student can copy another student and turn in that bubblesheet for the grade and never get caught (no flags on this). *****How to check it... You (or a TA) must click on "Import bubble sheets" for an assignment, once that page loads, UNcheck the "Show errors only" checkbox. Now you have a listing of ALL bubblesheets with the version numbers. Copy and paste into a spreadsheet program and sort. This allows finding the duplicates (if any). Of course not all duplicates are cheating cases - most are just errors in bubbling the version number. Those are obvious though after checking the scores. It is the case of the two high scores that must raise suspicion.

Problem Set BOOKS You can now have a updated version of the questions from the database. In the right margin menu on your main page with your assignments listed, you'll now see a "print book" option listed. Click it. A pull down menu appears with all the books available - note books are there for many disciplines - and yes, you have access to them also if you want. Right now, only the "all chemistry" option is there and there are only 3 books (pdf's actually).

This is a very recent version of the database in Quest - many new questions will now be seen there. This is a good thing to have this. Better than nothing which is what we had.

Unfortunately, the books here do NOT currently show what kind of questions these are. Those old "wording variable" questions that many of us avoided are not flagged in anyway. However, we have been slowly but surely fixing many of those questions. I told the Quest administrators that we (chemistry) would be very happy to have ANY KIND OF BOOK with current questions. So we now have that. The tweaking and prettying up will come later.

Points Option in Quest:
In the assignment set-up, where you weight the assignments and tell how many drops, there is a radio button below that table that allows points to be accumulated. This works similarly to a point system: All the points from assignments in a category (say homework) are summed. The overall score is then (total points acquired)/(total points possible) which is reported as a percentage. This is different from the default, which is to equally weight all assignments in a group; all the percentages are averaged in that case. Quest does NOT display in a nice way a completely point based grading system. Say where homeworks are all 50 points, quizzes 10 each, exams at 300, final at 400... so you have a running total of all points. Quest doesn't currently do this.