Maintaining the integrity of your assignments is paramount to gauging your students’ understanding of the material being taught. Castle has several features that teachers can use to keep their students honest:
- NEW FEATURE – Chrome Extension Lock Screen – When enabled, students will not be able to open a new tab or window while working on an assignment. (Chrome extension needs to be downloaded prior to enabling this feature. Click here for instructions.)
- Time on Task – When enabled, this tracks the time a student spends working on each question and calculates overall time for the assignment. Teachers can use this information to determine if a student is spending the appropriate amount of time on each question/assignment.
- Quiz Mode – This mode gives the students only one attempt to answer each question before moving to the next, without knowing if the answer is correct or not. This prevents students from sharing the correct answer.
- Disabling Text Selection – This prevents the students from being able to quickly copy and paste the question into a search engine to locate the answer.
- Randomize Question Order – This option randomizes the question order so every student sees the questions in a different order, making it more difficult for students to complete the assignment together.
- Open Auto Lock – When students answer questions in this mode, they have two attempts at answering each question and can see the correct answer. However, once they move to the next question they cannot return to a previously answered question to share the correct answer.
- Assignment Timer* – The timed option sets a specific amount of time the student has to complete the assignment. Once the student begins, the timer starts and does not stop until it reaches zero. This limits the time the student can spend looking up answers.
- From/To Setting* – Allows the teacher to control when the student can access the assignment (set day and timeframe). This means students all have to be working on the assignment at the same time, not allowing them to complete it first and share answers.
- Personal Content Sets (PCS) – The teacher has the ability to write their own questions and use in an assignment. This prevents students from locating the question within a search engine because it was custom-created by the teacher.
- AVAILABLE SOON – Photo Math Blocker – When enabled, math equations created by the teacher photographed by a student will be unreadable by the Photo Math app.
*When used together, the assignment is only available to students during the specific timeframe AND they only have the set amount of time to complete it.
Being proactive on maintaining assignment integrity benefits the students as well as the teachers.