Advice for Large Enrollment Courses

Instructure and Respondus have both provided some general recommendations related specifically to large enrollment exams. Although these recommendations are intended for large enrollment courses with approximately 1,000 students enrolled, these general recommendations could also be applied to smaller courses if you are concerned about network or connectivity issues related to synchronous exams.

Instructure Recommendations

Are you relying on Canvas for exams this year? We have some recommendations for large enrollment exams you won't want to miss:

• New Quizzes can handle large enrollment exams significantly better than Classic. 
• When using Classic Quizzes for large enrollment exams. It is typically recommended that you spread out start times so that things can load more quickly. The goal is to avoid having everyone click ‘Start Quiz’ at the same time. You should also consider granting users ~10 extra minutes to take the quiz due in case an increase in load times does occur.  
• Note: This recommendation wouldn't hurt to apply to New Quizzes as well, but should not be required. 

Respondus Recommendations

Respondus Monitor can scale to tens of thousands of simultaneous tests – even more. What is most likely to happen when institutions give large-scale exams with students starting the test at the exact same time are connectivity issues. A few things to avoid those:

• If network/connectivity is a concern, do not have large numbers of students start exams at the exactly same time.
  • Stagger the start times of exams so that fewer students encounter issues (even a 10 or 15-minute window would improve the student experience, connection to the test, etc.)
  • During particularly busy times of the year, having the test start 10 minutes after the top of the hour would help, as many instructors will open exams at X:00, not X:10.
• Students should pre-install LockDown Browser at a minimum, so that hundreds of students are not downloading a large file at the same time.
• Make sure all students have done a practice exam on the device/network they plan to use for the exam. 
• To reduce the anxiety of students, instructors should consider allowing a little extra time to complete the exam (e.g. 10-15 minutes). In this way, if students have a technical hiccup at the start, they will be less stressed during the actual exam.
• Remind students that Help Center is available within Respondus Monitor, and it will help them troubleshoot technical issues (webcam, microphone, internet connection, etc.). They can use this immediately before an exam to ensure everything is working correctly. Live chat support is available from this area when using Respondus Monitor. Live Chat is also available from the “It’s Not Working” links that appear in the pre-exam startup steps.  
• In very rare cases of extremely high test volume (as happened during COVID lockdowns), Respondus Monitor will implement an auto-scaling queue feature. Students will enter a queuing system with a countdown clock showing when the proctoring session will begin. In the rare event that the queuing system is triggered, the countdown clock isn’t expected to last more than five minutes.