Exam editing made painless

Every Learning Forge examination contain smart features (hidden fields, smart styles) to save you time and effort as you edit the exam. It is worth your time to review these features

Rights and Responsibilities

You have purchased the ongoing rights to:

Edit and modify the provided examinations
Print exam & associated resources for students & teachers at your school only.
Place the examination and solutions on a secure Learning Management System (LMS) or similar provided it is only available to members of your immediate school community after the security date!
These rights cease if your school entity ceases.

You do NOT have the rights to:

Distribute, copy or share any of the examination or associated materials to persons beyond your school community or place them in a location where they are accessible (physically or electronically) by persons outside your immediate school community.

Thank you for respecting intellectual property rights

Please use your school logo on your version of the exam.

Tailoring your version of this exam

MC questions sheet

A bubble-sheet OMR style sheet has been provided to make your students familiar with this format, but you will be marking these sheets manually.

Question and Answer Booklet

Section II has been formatted for printing on A3 with non-scanning gutters. This makes for easy to guillotine and scanning of your exams prior to marking (recommended practice that many schools follow). If you wish to remove, the artwork for this is found in the footer of the document. Select and delete.

Exam Analysis Spreadsheet

The provided spreadsheet is an invaluable tool for tailoring the exam. It identifies questions against module and also the approximate degree of difficulty and provides you with a running target to reach your desired marks per module.

The spread sheet totals the marks per module for both Section I and II
Identify questions to remove to bring the exam to your target
Re-number your questions (see the instruction in this document for doing this semi-automatically)
I recommend that you leave the “Worked Solutions” document untouched and complete. Then, you can provide the removed questions to your students later as revision (especially between the Trial and the HSC exam) and they will already have access to the solutions and explanation videos.

The yellow highlights in the exam document indicates details you will need to adjust once you have finalised your version of the examination.

Flexibility Questions

As advertised, this exam contains extra questions, giving you the flexibility to tailor the exam for the components of the course you have covered.

Care has been taken to order the questions appropriately. I recommend retaining the same order of questions and only deleting the unwanted ones. This will make all other tailoring of your examination and solutions document (with linked QR code videos) easier. Regardless, fields have been used for the question numbers so re-numbering can be automatically done (see below)

You will also notice more large-mark question than is typical in a typical HSC Science exam – some of the flexibility questions are embedded in these questions, hence when your exam is trimmed to the suggested mark total (100 marks for Trial Exam, 70-75 marks for Yr 11 Course Exam) the exam should better reflect the balance of smaller and larger questions. It is anticipated that in culling questions, these larger questions would reduce to the typical ranges for HSC.

Each question is identified by a unique question ID (QID)

This allows for easy matching of question to solution once you have edited (and hence changed question numbers) in your version of the exam.

These are located on the right in both sections I and II. It is strongly recommended that you leave these visible as it will make it easier for students to find the correct QR-code linked video after the exam AND easier to students to find the correct solution in that document.

However, if you wish to hide these, I recommend making them white font colour so that they can be re-revealed later on.

 To make the QID invisible: (Note: I do NOT recommend doing this)

Highlight any QuestionID completely,
Change the font colour to white,
In the styles ribbon, click on the style “QID”, right-click and choose “Update QID to match selection”

Page-breaks in the MC section have been allowed to flow, since these will change according to which questions you remove. Please adjust these as required once you have your final version.

Automated Question re-numbering

In Section I, the questions are a number list. If you have any issues with a question number – say reverting to 1 when it should be a higher number - , right click and choose “continue numbering.

If you have issues with the MC options not starting at “A”, then right click the first option and choose “restart numbering”.

For the Short and extended Response question numbers, you need to follow the instructions below for them to update.

In Section II, the questions are an incrementing field.

To update these numbers so they are sequential again (after your editing):

Find any section II question number in the document.
Choose “Select ALL” (control+a or command+a) to highlight the entire document.
Right-click on the question number
Choose “Update field”.

Solutions document: You can apply the same process and if you have kept the same order, and removed the flexibility questions from the solutions document also, then the question numbers will match.

NOTE: there is a hidden field in the instructions section of Section II which is critical for the numbering in section II to start from 21. Do NOT delete or alter this field. It will not print on the exam.

Solutions document

Option 1: retain a complete solutions document

As mentioned, you may want to retain all the worked solutions so that you can provide students with the questions you removed (at some later date) and not have to re-issue the worked solutions. If you choose this option, the “question numbers” in the solutions document should be removed as they can’t possible correlate to your edited exam. Your students then just match the QID codes to find the appropriate solution for each question.

Option 2: Remove unused questions.

If you do this (and keep the same question order) you can simply update the question numbers automagically in the solutions document (select all, right-click a question number and choose “update field”, as shown above). Now, the question numbers will match for your version of the Question-and-Answer booklet.

QR linked explanatory videos

The links will point to “placeholder” videos on the Learning Forge website. Since these are accessible to anyone with the link, they will remain invisible until the security period ends. Exams and solutions must NOT be presented to students before this date and hence for security reasons, these videos will only be released at the end of the security period.