Print Exams and Online Exams are the Same Thing (well, almost)

Many people don't know this, but Respondus was originally conceived as a way for instructors to create a print exam that could be additionally published to an online course. Yet, some users are surprised when they learn that Respondus can print high-quality exams, or save files in MS Word and other formats — complete with graphics, tables, equations, and enhanced formatting.

Respondus blurs the lines between online exams and print exams. If you create a question that has a table, Respondus will publish it to a course management system as an HTML table, but still be able to print the table like a word processor. Similarly, if you add a math equation to a question, Respondus must be able to print that equation at high resolution for a paper-based exam, but turn the equation into an image or MathML when it is published to an online course. These and many other issues are handled behind-the-scenes by Respondus.

Respondus also tries to prevent users from unknowingly creating questions that cannot be used in both print and online exams. For example, if you do a screen capture of an image and paste it into word processor document, it will print reasonably well. But that same image (known as a bitmap) isn't suitable for use in an online exam. So if you attempt to add a bitmap image to a Respondus question, Respondus will detect this and offer to convert the image to jpeg format (which is a more suitable format for web browsers).

Printing An Online Exam
Have you ever wanted to print an exam that is already in your course management system? Perhaps you need to administer a makeup exam, or print the exam for someone who is visually impaired. Printing an exam directly from a course management system is generally unsatisfactory because the print quality is poor and extraneous content from the screen is printed along with the exam questions. Exporting the questions from a course management system isn't an option either, because the data format used by CMSs is more similar to programming code than word processor text. The quickest and best way to solve this problem is to follow these steps using Respondus:

• Select the "Retrieval and Reports" tab and click "Retrieve Questions".
• Select your online course from the pull-down list, and then select the exam you want to retrieve.
• Enter a name for the exam being downloaded and click the "Retrieve" button. A few moments later you will receive a prompt that the exam has been downloaded.
• Go to the "Preview & Publish" tab and select "Print Options".
• Either print the exam directly from Respondus or select the option to save the file in MS Word or rich-text format. (Note: some media files and HTML cannot be printed, and certain images may print poorly. So check the printed exam carefully before providing it to students.)

One final tip. Respondus also makes it easy to create answer keys for exams. Simply go to the "Print Options" tab, select "Exam with Answer Key" option, and then continue to the print (or "save to File") step. Combine this with the previous example of downloading an exam from your online course and it provides a quick way to obtain a printed answer key of an online exam.

Source: Respondus, Inc. (www.respondus.com)
Originally Published: April 18, 2002
Revised: January 29, 2003

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