Questionmark Perception is an integrated software suite that enables you to create your own tests, surveys and questionnaires for online delivery. These types of online question and answer exercises are all known as assessments. People who work through assessments are called participants.

When participants take assessments, their results are stored in a database that may be used by administrators for analysis and reporting.

There are a variety of ways of using Perception, but they all involve the basic stages, which are listed below:

1. Authoring
   This is the process of composing a structured bank of questions and then selecting appropriate ones for assessments that are given to participants.
2. Publishing
   When assessments have been constructed from questions, they must be copied to a database (together with any associated files) from which they can either be delivered with a web server, or used by participants who are not web enabled.
3. Delivery,br> Participants can now take the assessments, either by accessing a URL (which points to a server program) from within their web browser (if they are web enabled), or by using a special Windows program (if they are not).
4. Reporting
   When the participants have taken their assessments, Perception offers two powerful tools for reporting and analysis of the results: Enterprise Reporter and Windows reporter.

Begin by reviewing and following the steps in the New User Handbook.

Check out the contact page for help.

Enterprise reporter allows the user to view reports on assessment outcomes or grades. For detailed information on Report, check out the Perception Support Site.

Training is offered periodically during Spring and Summer Institute. Contact the Delta Lab for additional information on training opportunities.

Also, check out the on-line tutorial.

You can’t be 100% certain. However, you can build in certain measures that will offer some security.

• You can have a large database of questions from which Perception draws at random - for example, each student gets 25 questions pulled randomly from a database of 40 or 50.
• Also, each student can get the questions in a different order; and in multiple-choice questions, the choices can be scrambled. You can make these choices when creating the test.
• Most important, when a student logs into our Perception server, many functions are disabled, such as right-clicking (preventing copying the page) and printing.

  Tell your students to use IE only, as some functions cannot be disabled in some versions of Netscape, and the AOL browser does not work well with Perception. None of this is foolproof, and you always have the option of requiring students to take the test in a proctored environment.

This is virtually impossible. No one can log into your tests unless you grant them permission through Enterprise Manager.

You may want to make some tests available to all comers, for example an ungraded “pre-test.” However, you can easily prevent any test from appearing in the “open” website. When you create the assessment file, follows the steps below:

• Open the “control block” and click on the “security” tag.
• Check the box marked “prevent open access to assessment”.
• If you wish to password protect the test, click “set password to publishing and scheduling.” and assign a password (this password will be needed by anyone who wants to create schedules (i.e., assign tests to students) or to upload the test to the server).