Question pools are subsets of questions selected from your question banks or existing assessments within your Blackboard site. They allow you to specify a random selection of questions each time a student takes an assessment, ensuring that each student receives a different combination of questions. This feature helps maintain assessment validity across multiple attempts or resits and reduces opportunities for academic misconduct.
When you create an assessment, you can use question pools to ensure each student receives a different version of the assessment. In the student view, questions randomly selected from a pool appear just as other questions do. Students won't know the questions are from a pool.
Key Features of Question Pools
- You can use a keyword search to find questions to add
- You choose the number of questions from a pool to display to students. For example, you can show 3 questions out of 50. The questions are then randomly distributed so each student sees a different set of 3 questions
- You can display all the questions in a pool. Questions appear in a random order for each student
- After you make your selections, you set the same points possible for all questions in the pool
- You can delete questions in a pool. The question is removed from the pool, but not deleted from your Blackboard site
Limitations
You can't add question pools to assessments when these settings or conditions exist:
- You've added a rubric to your assessment
- You've chosen to collect submissions offline
- Students have opened the assessment
Create a Question Pool
- Open your Blackboard site and navigate to your test assessment (or create a new test).
- Click on the Add Content (+) icon and choose Add question pool. The question pool is inserted at this point in the assessment.
Note: On the Add Question Pool page, you can browse, preview, filter, and select questions from other assessments and question banks in the Blackboard site you're currently in. You can view the questions, but you can't make edits until you add the question pool to your assessment.
- In the filter (left side column) tick the question banks you want to use.
- You can use a keyword search to find questions to add.
- Tick the questions you want to pool together from the filtered list. You can view how many questions you've selected at the bottom of the screen.
- Click Add Questions when you have made your selection.
- You now need to set up the question pool:
◾ Allocate the points per question
◾ Choose the number of questions to display to students from the pool of questions
◾ Click the Save button when you are finished.
- Repeat the steps as necessary to construct your test. Question pools will have a 'pool' icon next to the question. You may edit the questions by clicking the 'view questions' link. You can use the up/down arrow icon (visible when you hover your cursor over the question header) to click and drag the questions to reorder the test.
