Go to Interactive Achievement Login Page

Search for Specific Students in IA

Interactive Achievement (IA) is a web-based student assessment system that is closely aligned with Virginia's Standards of Learning. IA enables teachers and administrators to create online quizzes and exams by selecting items from a large question bank of SOL questions. After your students take the test online, you can view an item analysis of the results. This analysis will identify the topics that may be causing problems for your students.

We have already created student and staff accounts within Interactive Achievement and begun to provide training for our staff. If you wish to start exploring Interactive Achievement's capabilities on your own, obtain your username and password from your principal or supervisor and use the Interactive Achievement User Guide to explore the system. There are links to the User Guide and login page below. You can also access the login page by clicking the IA link in the menu bar at the top of this page.

Please note that the Interactive Achievement system consists of live data, so if you create any quizzes, make sure they are ones that you will actually use. At this point, we don't have a way of deleting quizzes, so we don't want to clutter our system with quizzes that people created for practice purposes.

Interactive Achievement Support

Smyth County has a support agreement with Interactive Achievement. If you need help, contact Interactive Achievement at 540-206-3649, or email IA support at support@interactiveachievement.com.

Naming Scheme for Quizzes and Tests

We have adopted the following naming scheme for quizzes and tests that teachers create:

1. Begin with your school's initials: AES, CES, CHS, CMS, MIS, MMS, MPS, MSHS, NHS, NMS, RVES, SCTC, SES, or SGCS.
2. Follow that with the first six letters of your last name plus your first and middle initials, followed by a hyphen.
3. Follow that with a brief description of the quiz or exam. You don't have to include the subject in that description, because quizzes will be categorized under specific subjects.

Here is a sample name for a quiz created by Jane A. Doe at Atkins Elementary School to test her students' understanding of rounding:

AESDoeJA-Rounding01.

Following this naming scheme will ensure that you can easily select your own quizzes and exams from a list of all quizzes that have been created in the same subject area.

Creating Custom Questions

Interactive Achievement enables us to create our own custom test questions. At this time, do not create any custom questions. Please select your questions from the existing test bank. We have a few issues to resolve before we start adding custom questions to the test bank.

Interactive Achievement Links

• Interactive Achievement Logon Page for Teachers/Administrators
• Interactive Achievement User Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm an elementary teacher with only one class. Why do I show up with four classes in Interactive Achievement?

In Interactive Achievement, a class is a group of students who are taking a particular SOL subject--such as second-grade math, or fifth-grade science, or Algebra I--at the same time, with the same teacher. See Figure 1 below. That means that most elementary students will be assigned to four different classes--language arts, math, science, and social studies--even though they may have the same teacher for all four subjects. Some of our elementary schools are using an instructional model in which the same teacher teaches the same subject for all students in a particular grade. Interactive Achievement will support this instructional model.

Figure 1

If I am an elementary teacher who has students from another teacher's homeroom in some of my classes, should I create a separate Interactive Achievement class for those students?

If you are teaching those students at the same time as your regular students, there is no need to create a separate class for them. Doing so would only complicate matters when you set up Interactive Achievement test sessions. This example may help: Teacher A and Teacher B both teach fifth grade at the same school. Teacher A teaches math for both classes, and Teacher B teaches language arts for both classes. Teacher B should drop all of the students from her fifth-grade math class, and Teacher A will add those students to her math class. Teacher A will drop all of the students in her fifth-grade language arts class and Teacher B will add them to her class.

How do I move students from another teacher's class into my class?

1. After logging into IA, go into the Administration Module.
2. Click the Students Tab in the window on the left side of the page. This window is divided into three tabs: Teachers, Students, Courses.
3. Select the grade for the student whom you wish to add to your classes.
4. Select the student from the scrolling list of students.
5. The student and the classes in which he or she is enrolled will show up in the right window. There will be a Drop button beside each class.
6. Click the Drop button beside the class or classes from which you are moving the student.
7. IA will ask you to verify the drop. Click OK to proceed.
8. After you finish dropping the student from existing classes, click the Add Course...button to add the student to your classes. The Add Student to Course dialog box will appear. This dialog box contains the student's name, the school term, a Subject dropdown list, and a Course window.
9. Select the appropriate subject from the Subject dropdown list. This list is subdivided into the four core SOL areas. Click the + sign beside each core area to display that courses belonging to that core area. Then click the appropriate course.
10. IA will then display a list of sections or classes in the Course window. (Note on terminology: IA refers to these sections as courses, but they are really course offerings. At the middle school and high school level, the IA courses represent what we call course sections. At the elementary level, the IA courses represent a particular teacher's SOL core area classes. For example, MATH4-99-01 represents the fourth-grade math class taught by teacher number 99. In the event the same teacher teaches more than one fourth-grade math class, she would have a second course identified as MATH4-99-02.)
11. Select the appropriate course and click the Add Student to Course button.

Not all of my students are listed in my Interactive Achievement classes.

We did the initial upload of student, class, and teacher data into Interactive Achievement from data stored in the SASIxp student information system. If you have received new students since that upload, they won't be reflected in Interactive Achievement. Each school will designate someone to handle enrollments and withdrawals in Interactive Achievement. If all of your students don't show up in your Interactive Achievement classes, ask your school's IA contact person to enroll your students in Interactive Achievement. Then you will be able to add them to your class.

How do my students take an exam once I have created it and set up a test session?

Students take Interactive Achievement exams through a special browser called iTest. We have to install this browser on every computer that will be used for Interactive Achievement testing. We will notify each school principal once that school's computer labs are ready for IA testing.

Can I access Interactive Achievement from home?

Yes.

If I create custom questions for Interactive Achievement, can I include charts, pictures, or other graphics in them?

Yes. Your graphics must be no larger than 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels high. (This is a change from IA's previous recommendation of 400x550 pixels.) Photographs should be in JPEG format. All other graphics should be in GIF format. You can use Microsoft PowerPoint's drawing tools to create your graphics. Here is a tutorial on drawing with PowerPoint. To ensure that your graphics fit the IA dimensions, use the PowerPoint Page Setup command to set up your slide show as depicted in Figure 1. After you finish your drawing, save it as a GIF file, with no spaces in the filename. Your school's Instructional Technology Resource Teacher can explain how to get the graphic into IA.

Figure 1

What settings do I use in PowerPoint if I want to create a graphic other than 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels high?

Divide the desired dimension in pixels by 96 to determine the setting for PowerPoint's Page Setup dialog box. For example, if you want to create a graphic that is 400 pixels wide by 200 pixels high, set the PowerPoint width to 4.17 inches and the height to 2.08 or 2.09. The reason for this is that PowerPoint outputs its slides at 96 pixels per inch resolution when you save the slides in GIF or JPEG format.

I have forgotten my Interactive Achievement password. Whom do I contact?

Your school's Interactive Achievement contact.

Interactive Achievement School Contacts

This page was modified on September 22, 2008.