1. Enter a Title for the assessment, which should be descriptive of the type of activity.
   
   
2. Enter a Description for what you want to call the assessment within Grade Book. This is important if your assessment titles are long. You can shorten them to a name that makes sense within Grade Book and for students to view under My Grades. You have approximately 32 characters you can enter for a name within Grade Book.
   
   
3. Decide whether to show or hide the item.
   
   
4. Select the type of assessment you want and click Save if you are not ready to add questions. Click Save and Add Questions if your questions are already developed and you are ready to add them.

Once the assessment is saved, you can add questions to it. If you click Save and Add Questions, Vista will take you directly to the question database.

You have several options when you save the assessment.

You can view the title of the assessment, the type of assessment, and whether it is hidden or not. If you are ready to make it available, click the Action Links icon  and click Show Item. This step cannot be completed until there are questions in the assessment. This area will also show how long the students have to take the assessment and how many points the assessment is worth.

Additional options are as follows:

• Go to Assessment : Allows you to go directly to the assessment.
  
  
• Edit Properties : Allows you to edit assessment settings. Depending on the type of assessment, the settings may be different.
  
  
• Preview : Allows you to preview the assessment to make sure everything is set up properly.
  
  
• Hide Item : Allows the assessment to be available or unavailable to students. This option cannot be selected until there are questions in the assessment.
  
  
• View Links to This Item : Allows you to view which components in Vista are linked to the assessment.
  
  
• Set Release Criteria : Allows you to release an assessment based on a group, member, date, or column in Grade Book. To find out more information about Selective Release in Vista , see the ITS handout “Selective Release Handout.”
  
  
• Export : Allows you to zip a complete assessment, download it from your section, and put it into another section or template through Content Import.
  
  
• Delete : Allows you to delete an assessment. Once you delete an assessment you cannot retrieve it, so make sure you really want to delete it.

More about Edit Properties

You have several different options within Edit Settings. The first option is to decide if you want to change the name of the assessment and what you want to name the column in your Grade Book. As shown in the following figure, these two entries can be named differently. You also can hide or show the assessment as soon as you create it.

You also will need to decide how you want students to receive assessments. You have three options:

1. All questions at once.
   
   
2. Questions presented one at a time and students are allowed to revisit previous questions.
   
   
3. Questions presented one at a time and students are not allowed to previous questions.

The second or third options, whether or not you want to allow students to be able to change their answers, is recommended for two reasons. First, students cannot print the all the questions at once, which is possible if you display all questions at once. Second, choosing the second or third option also benefits students who may use screen readers to view pages. If students use a screen reader, the cursor will jump to the top of the page when students click Save. Therefore, if you present all the questions at once, the screen reader will have to go through all the questions again to get to questions that have not yet been answered.

You can also decide if you want the name of the question to be viewed by the students. This is usually not recommended since many people name their questions with the answer. This might also be confusing if you are using question sets. The question titles will not be in any type of order when randomly drawing from a question set. This will also give students an easy way to cheat. If they know the name of the question, it might be easier to ask other students what the answer is.

The next two areas you need to determine are the display assessments and duration. Within the display assessments, you can choose to display the assessment in the same browser window or open in a new browser window. You can then decide the duration of the assessment. You can choose “unlimited” if time limit is not an issue. However, if time is a factor, you can choose anywhere from one (1) minute to several days.

It is recommended you give students more than just one (1) minute per question for objective tests. For example, if you have a test with 50 multiple-choice questions, you may want to allow 60 minutes to complete the test. Determining durations completely depends on both the type and difficulty of your questions. It may take you a few semesters for you to determine the perfect time period.

If it is important that students do not have access to the assessment after the allotted time, click the checkbox next to Disallow answer submission if time has expired. Students will be able to finish the assessment past the allotted time if you do not click the checkbox. You will know when this has occurred because the grade will be red instead of black in the assessment submissions area. If you do not click the checkbox, you will have to go back into each submission to take off the points for questions that were answered after the time limit, if you choose to do so.

The next area within the settings pertains to the number of attempts you will allow students to take an assessment. If you only want students to take an assessment once, then the rest of the questions in the area can be ignored; however, if you want more than one attempt, you must answer the next three requirements in Vista . The first requirement is whether or not you want each attempt to have different questions chosen from a question set. If you are not using question sets, then you do not have to worry about this setting. If you use question sets, you need to decide whether or not to include this requirement. For example, students can either get the same questions or another random selection of questions for additional attempts. If you want different questions chosen from a question set, you must click the Randomize questions in a question set for each attempt checkbox.

The second requirement is to decide if you want to set any time between attempts for students. Intervals can range from one (1) minute to several days. It is recommended you include at least a one (1) minute interval.

The third requirement is to decide which graded attempt you want to accept. You have options of choosing First, Last, Highest, or Average. Be careful with choosing Last because Vista could assign a zero (0) grade for that attempt if someone accidentally opens the wrong assessment and closes it out without doing anything, which would be the last attempt. Highest or Average are chosen most often. If you want students to have the option of retaking the assessment for review purposes after their first attempt, then you can choose First so student grades will not change due to multiple attempts.

The final settings before More Options are releasing the score and statistics. Again, you have three requirements.

1. Release the score once students have finished an assessment. This allows students to access View Results when they have finished an assessment so they can see their grade immediately.
   
   
2. Release the score once students have finished an assessment and all questions have been graded. This is important if you have a paragraph question you want to have graded before students see their grades. If you use the first setting and have a paragraph question, then students will get a partial score until you have the paragraph question graded.
   
   
3. Do not release the score. Use this setting if you want to view grades and statistics before releasing them to students. In addition, use this setting if you have made an assessment available for a long period of time and do not want students to cheat off of other students who have already completed the test.