UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Pollock Testing Center at University Park is now ready to offer etesting through Canvas. Faculty who have been testing in ANGEL, but teaching in Canvas, will experience a simplified process. ANGEL etesting will still be available, but faculty no longer have to wait to transition to Canvas.
Testing Center developers began conducting feasibility tests to allow simultaneous Canvas and ANGEL etesting in late November 2016. Since then, additional functional tests have been conducted with low- and high-stakes exams in small and large enrollment courses. These tests allowed the developers to uncover and remedy potential issues.
In early February, Carla Hass, senior instructor in biology, used Canvas to administer an etest exam to the 500 students in her sophomore-level course on ecology and evolution.
“Our first experience went very smoothly,” Hass said. Unlike ANGEL, Canvas does not have an embedded calculator. However, Hass allowed her students to use their own calculators for her exam. Penn State IT is exploring how to make such unique etesting features of ANGEL available in Canvas.
More than 167,900 exam submissions were accepted for nearly 1,100 ANGEL exams during the 2015/16 academic year. Staff expect etesting to remain stable throughout the transition to Canvas from ANGEL.
If you are interested in creating exams in Canvas, help and support information is available. A recording of a training session, “Preparing Exams for the Pollock Testing Center” is available by email request to itstraining@psu.edu. Please visit http://lrn.psu.edu/ for a current schedule of IT Training workshops as more live sessions are added.
Basic information about testing with Canvas in the Pollock Testing Center is available at http://testing.psu.edu/Faculty as is information about scheduling an exam. Scheduling begins one month before the semester starts; dates are announced on the website. Faculty who are flexible in their exam dates or not competing for space during traditional midterm weeks may have an easier time fitting into the etest schedule.