Sometimes when faculty are creating online quizzes in Blackboard, they use the cut-n-paste method. When copying questions from MS Word into your assessment, you should use an intermediate step for cleaning up the underlying (hidden) Word codes. Copy your text from Word and then paste it into Notepad. From Notepad, copy the text and then paste into the Blackboard assessment.
Why add this extra step when copying text? MS Word uses many hidden codes to make the text on a page look the way it does. Some of these codes are as simple as [bold] or [center] to cause some text to be bolded or centered. However, there are many more hidden codes that Word uses and all of them are unnecessary when pasting text from Word into Blackboard. So, if you do not “clean up” these hidden codes, you run the risk of pasting extraneous coding into Blackboard and this can cause unexpected problems.
Sometimes, the extra coding causes tests to hang or drop the test taker while they are trying to complete the quiz. Some quiz takers may not have a problem, while others are unable to complete the process. *I am not sure if the problems occur when a certain browser is used ( IE vs Firefox), or if there are other settings which trigger the issue.
