Building a Test

Various options are available for building quizzes and tests to be delivered to students via a Blackboard course.  If your publisher provides a test bank (either Blackboard-compatible or as a zipped file of Word documents), TLC staff can help you import those into a Blackboard course.  We can also assist with converting your own Word documents to Blackboard pools.  Learn more about these options on our Test Question Processing document.


If test banks are not available from a publisher or you do not already have electronic or printed versions of tests, you can also create a test one-question-at-a-time within Blackboard.  Additionally, use the options below to edit tests imported into Blackboard from a publisher.  

Build Test

1. Visit the Course Tools area under the Blackboard Control Panel  
2. select Tests, Surveys, and Pools  
3. select Tests 
4. click the Build Test button
5. enter a name for the test (description and instructions are optional)
6. click Submit

There are three buttons available on the action bar of the Test Canvas page, allowing instructors to either build tests one-question-at-a-time or add existing questions from pools or tests already in the course:

Create Question
There are seventeen question types that can be used within Blackboard.  Objective questions, such as multiple choice, matching, and true/false, can be automatically graded by Blackboard.  Subjective questions, such as short answer and essay, will need to be graded by the instructor.  There are also options like file response questions, which allow the student to upload an attachment - it is a good idea to have students prepare some things in advance and upload them, rather than taking a lot of test time to complete a more lengthy response.  Learn more at Blackboard Help's official Question Types page.  Many of the pages provide examples for each question type, as well as video tutorials.

Reuse Question
This is the option most commonly used, as it involves options to select questions from pools, tests, or a combination of both, to build a new test.  We don't recommend choosing Question Set (the first option), but instructors can either select Random Block or Find Questions.  Random Block allows you to pull numerous questions from a pool and assign a given number of questions to each student so that they are all receiving a different set of questions (for example, you can take 100 questions from a pool and randomly assign 20 or 25 to each student).  Find Questions allows you to select specific questions from various pools or tests to build a new test.  Learn more at Blackboard Help's Reuse Questions page.

Upload Questions
Microsoft Excel or .txt files can be specially formatted and uploaded to Blackboard to create a test.  Learn more at Blackboard Help's Upload Questions page.

Building a test makes it available to you as an instructor and allows you to edit it at any time, but the test will not be visible to students until you deploy it.  Visit us again next week for an overview of deploying tests within Blackboard and the various options involved.