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Secure Testing Best Practices

Follow these recommendations to ensure academic integrity in online tests in your MindTap course.

Note The Aplia™, CNOW, and Turnitin tools are not available for all textbooks.

Time Limit

Set a time limit for your test or assignment. Time limits give students less time to search for answers they do not already know.

Add a time limit to Aplia tests or CNOW tests.

CNOW

Set Time allowed per take to a specific number of minutes when creating or editing a test.

Password Protection

Set a password to be sure your students cannot access tests ahead of time. Students will not be able to begin the test until you share the password.

Set a password for any scoreable activity when you add it to the activities list. You can also set passwords in Aplia and CNOW.

CNOW

Set Password to take assignment when creating or editing a test.

Limit Availability

Make tests available for a short window of time. If tests are available for a long time, students have more opportunity to share answers. A short window of availability means students begin their tests at the same time and prioritize their own work.

When adding your test to the learning path, set Available Date and Due Date to the same date with only the appropriate amount of time between them.

Question Pools

A question pool is a list of questions from which a specified subset of questions are randomly selected for each student's assignment. This makes it difficult for students to share answers.

Note This feature is only available for the latest MindTap version.

Question Variation

If algorithmic questions are included in your exam, you can set these questions to generate different numerical values for each student. Students will be tested on the same concepts but have different answers, so they cannot share answers.

CNOW

Set the Regenerate algorithmic questions option to either For each student and each take or For each student on first take only when creating or editing a test.