Use of hints

Hi Sarah,

All questions that the students got correct were done without hints. If a student uses a hint on a problem, the question is automatically marked as wrong, even if they later enter the right answer. The final hint gives the solution to the problem, which is why it's automatically counted wrong. 

Let me know if you have any further questions!

 Hi Evan,  I thought that might be the case, however I created a "sample" student account that I use to try to answer questions that I have.  When I looked at my sample student data even the ones I clicked hint on showed up as correct in the SAT portion.  I will try another one to take a look.  

Hmm, that's interesting. I suppose the SAT section could be different that the other math sections, but the rest of KA counts the question wrong with using the hints. I don't have the SAT section set up on my account, but I'll forward your post to someone who does. 

I have a student who is abusing the hint facility by asking for hints, copying answers then retaking the tests until the problems repeat. She confessed that she has literally learned nothing for quite some time while this has been going on. I need a little more control over this otherwise excellent accountability system. Is there no way to turn off hints for a particular student or a particular class?

Thanks

Hi John,

Unfortunately, there is not a way to turn off hints for a class or student. However, there is a way to tell whether or not students are using hints or otherwise gaming the system.

If you go to the Manage tab in your class, you can click on the X / X completion statistic to view how many times each student has attempted the assigned exercise. If this number if significantly higher than the other students, then it's possible that the student is attempting to cheat the system.

Additionally, from the Scores tab in your class you can click on a particular student's score to view their assignment report. If you click on an individual question, you can see how many times they attempted that question and whether or not they used hints on the question.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

Actually, to be more precise, my problem is this. I don't mind if the students use the hints. That is a useful part of the learning process. But this student was very tricky. Whenever she ran into a question she couldn't answer, she would use the hints to get the answer and copy it down, then retake the test, and since the questions asked were repetitive, she'd just plug in the answer she had gleaned from the hint to get a good score on the second or third round. She confessed to me that she had not learned anything from the hint. It was just an exercise in rote copying of answers.

So, come to think of it, the feature I'd most like to have is not the ability to disable hints, but the ability to forbid any repeated questions for the same student taking an exam multiple times. 

I realize this is asking a lot, because it means that your team would have to come up with a database of redundant reserve questions that is much larger than the set of questions you currently have. But I wanted to follow up and clarify the problem, because I do feel that non-repeating questions that address the same material would be a valuable enhancement to your platform.

Consider this a feature request. Thanks.

Follow-up Question: When a teacher reassigns a test to a student, will the questions always be different on the second round?

Somehow the notification for your comment slipped through my inbox, but I've forwarded this very helpful feedback to the team for further consideration. Sorry for the delay here!

In response to your follow-up question, the student should see different questions on their second attempt of the assignment as long as you selected the "different questions for each student" option when you created the assignment. However, if there are not enough questions in the question bank to avoid repetition, then the system will start to reuse questions for subsequent attempts.