The Primary Instance of a course is a special nomination that can be given to one instance of each course at a time. It gives the instance a special URL that has the course name slug twice instead of having the course name slug followed by the instance name slug. The main use case is to be able to get a shareable link that will always point to the most recent course instance. This way links to Lovelace courses from other sites will not become obsolete whenever a new course instance is created.
Exam Guide for Students¶
Lovelace exam is a task type where you answer to a set of questions in one submission. These exams are generated from a pool of questions created by the teacher. The exam you see may have been created for you specifically, or for the whole class to be taken at the same time.
Exam Types¶
Exams can be split into types in two ways: target audience, and method of evaluation. Target audience can be personal, or general; evaluation can be automated, or teacher-controlled.
General Exam¶
General exam is an exam that has been generated for all students of the given course instance. This means all participants will have the same questions. In other words, this is the closest to a traditional exam. Due to all questions being the same for all students, these types of exams are usually open only for a limited time, and are usually evaluated by the teacher some time after the exam period has closed.
Personal Exam¶
A personal exam is an exam that has been generated specifically for your user account. As exams are generated from a pool of questions, this typically means your exam will have different questions than your peers. Teachers create the exam question pools in a way that similar questions are grouped together. This ensures that every participant will only get non-overlapping questions, and also all questions will be of equal value. This puts all participants who are taking personal exams on equal footing. Personal exams are typically used in ongoing course implementations where a set exam date would be impossible to organize.
Automatically Evaluated Exam¶
An automatically evaluated exam is graded immediately when it's submitted. The immediate feedback does not show which questions were correct and which were incorrect, but you can find this information in your answers page. Since it is an exam with immediate feedback, it is highly likely that the exam has been configured to only allow you to submit an answer one time. You can see that this is the case if the submission box of the exam task states how many attempts you have left.
Teacher-Evaluated Exam¶
Teacher-evaluated exam refers to exams where the evaluation is performed when the teacher initiates it. When you submit an answer to this type of exam, instead of any feedback, you will receive a message sayins it's waiting for evaluation by the teacher. The tasks icon will also be changed to the "submitted" icon. As long as the exam period has not closed, you can re-open the exam and change your answers by re-submitting it. Your latest answer will be considering in evaluation.
The Exam Interface¶
The exam interface has been designed for smooth answering to questions, and staying on top of your progress through the exam. You can easily see at all times which questions haven't been answered yet. You can also mark questions as certain/uncertain to remind yourself of questions you need to still come back to before submitting your answer, and easily revisit them by using question shortcuts. Do note that certainty information is not shown to the teacher, nor does it affect evaluation. Feel free to use it how you like.
The interface components and interactables are explained below.
A. Start Button¶
When you open the exam page, this is the only thing you can see of the interface. Pressing it loads the exam itself into the question box below it - provided there is an open exam attempt available for you. The start button can be seen in the following image.
B. Progress Tracker¶
This sticky UI component shows your pogress in the exam, and the state of remaining questions.
- Progress bar. Simply shows how many questions have been answered, and how many are left.
- Question states. This shows which questions are yet unanswered, or where you are not sure of your answer. These double as shortcuts. Clicking on a number scrolls you to that question.
C. Exam Question¶
Each question in the exam will be contained in a box like the ones seen in this screenshot. Their headings will always be "Question N" where N is the number of the question, and corresponds to the numbers shown in the progress tracker.
- Question heading for an unanswered question. The background is grey to indicate this state.
- Question heading for an answered question that's been marked uncertain (light green).
- Question heading for an answered question that's been marked certain (dark green).
- Certainty toggle button. Click this button (or its underlying heading) to toggle the state of your answer between certain and uncertain.
- Question text. Should tell you what is being asked.
- Answer widget. This is where you can enter your answer.
D. Submit Button¶
Pressing this button will submit your answer. If attempts are not limited, this will not be your final answer, and you can always resubmit as long as the exam is open. Please, note that the number of attempts might not change until you do not refresh the page. Do not press twice the button.
After pressing the submit button, you can see the number of correct answers at the bottom.