Online Examinations: What support can you expect from Information Services

While we wish to provide every support and encouragement to course teams who wish to use Questionmark Perception (QMP) for online assessment, Information Services unfortunately does not have unlimited resources.  Some staff have been surprised that we expect the course teams to retrieve the exam scores data for example, so this document is intended to try to clarify what IS teams can and cannot generally offer to you with respect to support for online testing.

We can

• Provide support (e-mail IS.helpline@ed.ac.uk) and basic training in authoring questions and assessments.  IAD can provide more specialist advice on the pedagogy of assessment. 
• Schedule summative assessments.
• Provide technical support for summative assessments held on the university campus.

We don’t generally

• Book the venue(s) and prepare the students for the event.
• Write questions for you. For your first use of QMP we will help you with the creation of questions (you still need to design the academic content of the question), but we need you to make arrangements to design and author questions locally in the longer term. We can provide help and support for local authors.  More information about authoring questions can be found in document on Authoring Questions in QMP. For authoring assessments, more information can be found in document on Creating QMP Assessments. These can both be found in the Help and Support section.
• Extract the results and pass these to you, or analyse the information produced after an assessment. The reporting templates allow authorised staff to access results after an assessment.  These include detailed reports about individual students and individual questions, as well as the immediate list of students and total scores.  More information about the reporting facilities is available in the document on Reporting and Analytics in QMP in the Help and Support section.

Getting help

For help and advice with using this service, please: