Ans at the TU Delft

Ans is a web-based system that supports the creation of interactive assignments for Formative and Summative assessment. It has won the digital assessment tender and will be TU Delft’s assessment system for all basic assessments in the coming years.

How does Ans relate to other assessment tools?

Figure: The assessment tool landscape of the TU Delft

 

1. Ans: Dedicated exam tool with practice options:

Ans is the standard exam tool, and a dedicated exam tool that portrarys some options for students to practice. Lectures can use Ans for:

2. Dedicated practice tools with a summative layer

In addition, there are dedicated practice tools that have a summative layer. This means that these tools were created to help students learn during the course (so for formative use). They do have options for use in exams (‘summative layer’), but they were not designed to be used for exams and therefore have some limitations. Examples are:

3. Learning management system

Our learning management system Brightspace is used for formative and summative assessments:

4. Other tools

  • Fraud prevention and detection tools, like Ouriginal (plagiarism tool) and RPNow (online proctoring tool)

Why are we happy with Ans?

  1. Useful analyses: It provides insightful analyses that help you directly improve your answer model.
  2. Insight into consequences of changing a subquestion to a bonus question: In addition, it directly shows the consequences for the passing rate and average score if you change a subquestion to e.g. become a bonus question.
  3. Positive student experience: The student experience is good, and it has standard options that increase the accessibility for students with e.g. dyslexia.
  4. Communication with students during an exam: It is possible to send announcements to all students and answer questions from individual students via chat during exams.
  5. Voluntary question bank use: Work with and without a question bank.
  6. Students can review (formative) assignments: Students can review each other’s or their answers, using an answer model you provide.
  7. Online student review: (students going over their reviewed work) The review can take place online. Students can add questions/comments online. This review can take place online, or in the secure digital exam environment of a digital exam room.
  8. Group assignments are also possible.
  9. Exam and grading preview:  It is possible to test the student view and grading view with the answer model.

General information on using Ans

Multimedia resources on Ans

Creating assignments, exercises, and questions

An assignment refers to an assessment or exam (in TU terminology), a question to an exercise, and a question to a subquestion.

Reviewing and grading

Students’ perspective of test-taking