A message from Jeffrey Stopple, Associate Vice Chancellor, Undergraduate Education and Linda Adler-Kassner, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education
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March 12, 2020

Dear Colleagues,
 
Thank you for your flexibility as the campus works with the COVID-19 interruptions to instruction. We write with a critical message about final exams on GauchoSpace. This message is especially crucial if you are teaching a course with more than 100 students enrolled.
 
If you have been thinking about planning an online quiz (especially a multiple-choice quiz) as an alternative for a paper-based final exam, you should consider an alternative. Many faculty seem to have settled on two alternatives for final exams
 

  •  Grade based on work to date, with students having the option to take a final later which can only raise their grade.  
  •  Take-home final exam, open book, open notes, turned in via Gradescope

 
https://instructional-continuity.id.ucsb.edu/assessment.html#gradescope-block
 
If you have already created a GauchoSpace quiz for your final exam, please make your exam available to students for a 12-24 hour window. Within that window, you will then set a time duration for the exam (that is, you can still say students will have three hours to complete the exam once they begin). Additionally, if a student reports issues submitting their exam, be prepared to re-open the exam. (Remember that students will require a longer timeframe for the exam than they would if they were taking the exam face-to-face.)
 
In order to ensure the reliability of submission, it’s essential that the load on GauchoSpace be spread out over time. Like all things and all people, GauchoSpace has a capacity limit. LSIT has been working around the clock to add capacity daily, but it’s essential that all work together to make sure that the system does not fail due to excessive load. We can do our parts by spreading out the time during which we ask students to access the “quiz” feature for final exams.
 
Jeff Stopple, AVC, Undergraduate Education
Linda Adler-Kassner, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education