Faculty Info

General Info

As you consider whether to use the CBTF in one of your courses, it’s worth thinking about the up-front effort required, as well as the long-term steady state effort needed to continue running your assessments in the CBTF. Below is a schematic from a paper by Zilles et al that shows the up-front and long-term time investments needed for running assessments in the CBTF.

Scaling properties of CBTF exams in terms of instructor effort. Left: traditional exams are less effort for a small number of students, but CBTF exams become more efficient for hundreds of students in a course. Right: CBTF exams require more up-front effort to create pools of question generators, but are much less effort to repeat in the future.

It’s important to try and plan ahead when considering the CBTF and it takes some planning to get scheduled in.

If you are interested in using the CBTF for your course, fill out this survey:


Hardware and Software

See the about page for details on what hardware and software is installed on the CBTF computers.

TA Usage

Rather than borrowing TAs from courses using the CBTF, we instead hire dedicated CBTF proctors and use a usage-based model to shift TA allocations from courses directly to the CBTF. This will mean that if you’re using the CBTF, your course will be allocated fewer TA units. We believe that this model results in:

  • More consistent application of the CBTF rules
  • Fair usage based model for CBTF sustainability
  • Less duplicated work between the CBTF coordinator and the course coordinators
  • More consistent CBTF availability
  • Better maintenance of the CBTF supplies
  • Building of expertise amongst proctors
  • Higher buy-in and a community of tight-knight TAs all working to improve the CBTF

During final exams, we may request additional proctoring support from course TAs due to the large number of shifts.

Setup

CBTF admins will poll instructors on the expected usage of CBTF facilities before the term begins. CBTF admins will then review polls and projected schedules to create a semester-long schedule for the CBTF.