About Knowledge Assessment Quizzes vs. Exams

For most companies, all knowledge or written assessments are the same.  After the employee/ learner answers a series of questions and achieves the pass mark, they are deemed competent on the corresponding task.  However, some companies have some tasks that are a "roll-up" of several tasks.  These assessments within these tasks will likely contain questions from all of the other tasks, making the assessment much larger.  Therefore, a regular task would contain a Quiz, and a "roll-up" task would contain an Exam.

The main differences become clear when using an educational institution as a model.  During a given course, a class may be given several quizzes.  After having written the quiz, the quiz is often returned with the answers discussed in class to develop an understanding of what the correct answers were, and why.  These quizzes then become a study tool to assist the students in learning the material and preparing for subsequent quizzes, and eventually the final exam.  However, do the students usually get their final exams back?  Rarely does this happen.  These exams are kept secure so that some of the questions could be reused in subsequent years to come.  Students may see their marks on the exam - but that is all they will see as an assessment summary.

TRACCESS CI (8.6) works in the same way.  There is now the possibility of creating Knowledge Assessments that are either Quizzes or Exams.  The main difference between these two types is the assessment summary that is available to the learner as soon as they submit their assessment for grading.  These assessment possibilities include:

• No Summary - the Assessment presenter closes as soon as the Learner clicks the submit button.  

• Marks Only -  the Assessment presenter will only show the Learner's Name, the Task name, and the mark obtained by the Learner

• Incorrect Only - the assessment presenter will show all incorrectly/ unanswered questions - this is the equivalent to what was shown in version prior to 8.6 and will be the default setting

• Complete -  the assessment presenter will show the entire assessment, how the questions were presented, and the learner's answers.

A Quiz Assessment will allow for any of the above summary types to be selected, whereas an Exam Assessment will only allow for either the No Summary or the Marks Only to be selected.