Brightspace/Online Exams at the EPC: Information for Faculty

Hosting assessments on Brightspace can be one of the easiest means for an instructor to provide SAS and non-accommodated students alike with equitable means of testing, even with the differing needs and priorities that accompany different courses. How to achieve that equity, however, may not be immediately obvious, especially to an instructor unfamiliar with Brightspace’s capabilities and/or with what their students’ accommodations entail. 

Please find below the information on how students with certain accommodations need special consideration for online testing, as well as how instructors can best (and easily!) support those students via Brightspace Course and Quizzes settings.  

For instructors with students who have extended time accommodations: 

SAS students with extended time accommodations receive a multiplier for the base time of an exam, which the instructor can check in Accommodate. Brightspace makes providing these students with their extended time easy via Course Level Accommodations, which can be set per individual student at the beginning of the semester and will apply to every Brightspace Quiz from that point onward. 

Here’s a tutorial from the ETS Knowledge Base on how to set extended time Course Level Accommodations! 

For instructors with students who have breaks accommodations: 

Certain SAS students are allowed to take breaks during exams without counting against active testing time. If your Brightspace exam is set to submit automatically at the end of its scheduled duration— which does not and cannot account for break times, as Brightspace timers cannot be paused— students with this accommodation might experience premature, automatic, and unfair exam submission.  

To counter this issue, instructors can grant Special Access to these students, allowing them to test without the time limit being enforced. As the EPC monitors timers “in house” (so to speak) regardless, our staff will always ensure that students with breaks take no more than ten minutes of break time per hour of test time. Having auto-submit turned off ensures that there are no accidental submissions when a student still has time remaining that Brightspace cannot account for. 

Here’s a tutorial from the ETS Knowledge Base on how to set Special Access parameters! 

Note: Students who have both extended time and breaks accommodations will need to have Special Access, as opposed to simply course-level accommodations, as the base extra time still cannot account for these untimed breaks. 

For instructors with students who have exam availability accommodations: 

Some SAS students might have an accommodation that allows them to reschedule due to disability or illness; others may have an accommodation that makes it so that they cannot test at given course’s regular class time (this will show up in Accommodate as “No Exams Before XX:XX AM/PM”). If your Brightspace exam is set to be available only during a specific in-class block, this can create a barrier to access for these students. Special Access is also a solution to this issue, in that instructors can set unique availability parameters for individual students that allow access at/on alternative times/dates.  

The EPC’s preferred method of ensuring availability is for Special Access to be set that allows the Quiz to be open for the entire day of a student’s particular booking. In addition to the aforementioned availability accommodations, EPC policy dictates that students are allowed to arrive as early as 15 minutes before their scheduled appointment time. By setting your exam to be available for the whole day, this ensures that students will be able to begin testing as soon as they have been checked in, whenever that may be. 

If you have any further questions on the technical side of configuring Brightspace, please either check out the Knowledge Base article on Brightspace Quizzes. You can also contact Enterprise Technology Services by submitting a help ticket. 

For all instructors submitting exams in an Online Format in Accommodate: 

Finally, a reminder that we do need faculty to submit information about their exams to the EPC in advance of the scheduled exam date and time even if it is a Brightspace exam with no password or timing parameters. This information is vital for our ability to support students when troubleshooting, as we cannot see the instructor’s side of Brightspace, only the student’s. We ask that professors answer these questions when submitting via Accommodate with regards to Brightspace exams, including: 

• Exam Password (if applicable) 

• Online Exam Type 

• Brightspace 

• ATI (Nursing ONLY) 

• Other (Pearson, etc.) 

• Accommodation Parameters 

• Timing 

• Exam has no time limit. 

• Extended time has been set at course-level per individual student accommodations. 

• Auto-submit 

• Exam will/will NOT auto-submit at the end of the scheduled exam time. 

• Availability 

• I have VERIFIED that the Brightspace exam will be available at confirmed EPC appointment time (per individual student bookings, may not match start of class time exactly). 

It is always the desire of the EPC to assist in striking the balance between what is easiest for faculty to integrate with the work they would already be doing for their courses, and what will be most supportive for our accommodated students while testing with us. Ultimately, however, this can only be accomplished if we work together with faculty to understand each other’s processes (your exams and our best practices) better. If you have any questions regarding the EPC’s preferred best practices for Brightspace exam parameters, or anything else related to exams, please be encouraged to reach out to the EPC by email at epc@uvm.edu.  We will be happy to clarify and explain anything and everything to help us all come to a common understanding.  

Thank you for continuing to work with us to ensure our students’ success!