How to work Starpath online course quizzes

• Please check the Student Discussion Forum frequently, and read all new posts. This is classroom discussion intended for all.  The courses are all dynamic, with new materials and new hints to questions and solution aids posted almost daily. We add new video support almost weekly. 

• Print the quiz before starting the assignments of a new lesson and use that copy as a study guide to fill in the answers are you proceed. Radar and weather have two quizzes per lesson; others just one.

• Note that some quizzes have links to required materials or hints that are not printed out when you print the quiz.

• When submitting a numerical value or other answer that required some computation, then please add as much as you like to show how you came to the answer, rather than the answer alone. This way the instructor can offer partial credit for simple math errors or explain steps that may not have been correct.

• When the printed quiz is filled out, return to the online page and transcribe your answers to the online form and then use the Print Lesson/Quiz button at the top of the tan frame on the left to print a copy of your quiz that shows the answers you selected. You can alternatively print this to a pdf if no printer. Using the browser print option might lose the answers. Then submit, and you should get a popup acknowledging the submission. Here is a video showing that procedure.

 

How the Scores are Computed

Each question has an assigned weight listed to the right of the question number, i.e., (wt 1). The final score is figured from the sum of the questions times their individual weights, divided by the sum of the weights. Questions with higher weights contribute more to the final score. Note some questions have zero weight (wt  0). This applies to blank (reserved) questions, or ones there just to think about, or question spaces we use to allow for your comments. These do not affect the final score, regardless of  how they are individually scored. We try to mark these right in all cases, but some times miss one.    

To track down answers
—that you do not find during the assigned reading and exercises, try these tips:

(1) Check the Glossary for key words in the question. Each lesson has assigned new terms. There is often a multiple choice question on each of these. You can reach the Glossary outside of the assignment page with this link www.starpath.com/glossary. And note this trick play: you can search the entire Glossary from the main starpath home page search. Check Glossary, uncheck All, and note the input conventions. Wildcards, phrases in quotes, etc

(2) Check the index of the printed textbooks, or more effective, do a search of the ebook version of the textbook. Start with a simple keyword, not a phrase.

(3) Search the Student Discussion Forum for the quiz number at hand, i.e., CN02 or IN05 or RC0303 or WX0103, which are the standard quiz number formats. This will usually find all discussions of that quiz. Or you can be more specific and look for CN03-0005, the fifth question of quiz three—but this might miss some posts if the subject was not entered properly. Some practice at this searching is extremely valuable. Video on how to search the Discussion Forum.

(4) Check the Course Video Index to see if there are videos on the general subject matter or even specific exercises.

(5) If none of the above finds the answer you want on a quiz question or general subject matter, then please post a new topic on your question. There are no questions too easy or too hard. You could simply ask, I cannot find how to work question 5 of quiz 6, or be more specific. Video on how to post a question.


IMPORTANT NOTES FOR ALL COURSES

• Please do not spend an inordinate amount of time looking for an answer after you have completed all the reading assignments and practice exercises. At that point just stop and post a question asking for help. We will then direct you to the answer or answer it there.

• You do not need to go online or to other books to answer any of our quiz questions. Indeed, going off in that direction means something important has been missed. Please post a question before doing that. The exceptions are when the course materials themselves direct you do specific online links. We periodically refer to our own articles at www.starpath.com/articles as ways to supplement the course materials.


• There are no trick questions. If a question is not clear or seems ambiguous then please post a question about it. We still, after 30 years and thousands of students, learn that some wordings in some questions can be misleading to some readers. We will stop and fix those as soon as they are reported to us.

• If you do not understand or disagree with a solution to a question that was missed, then please post a question about it. It could be you are seeing something we did not intend or we in fact have an error we should fix.

• If a quiz is received that would receive a lower than average score, or a procedure is clearly not fully understood, then (at the instructor's discretion) they will inform the student of this and offer the option to score it as is, or to delete it so it can be worked on more and resubmitted. Generally this will include notes on the quiz as it appeared and tips on further work, and as always, the encouragement to post questions as needed. The next submission will be scored as submitted, which allows moving on to the next lesson.

A couple course specific instructions

INLAND AND COASTAL NAV COURSE

• This course requires plotting tools, such as dividers and parallel rulers or roller plotter. See note in the Course Overview

• Be sure to put a label on all directions (bearings, courses, tracks, routes). This will be T, M, or C for true, magnetic, or compass. Even if a question specifically asks for a Magnetic or True answer, still get into the habit of adding the label.

• Always check the units! This is fundamental, and like with directions, every answer should have units. An answer is not 5; it is 5 something... ft, degrees, kts, etc. What is the distance between A and B? cannot be 4.5 hr. By simply getting into the habit of always writing down the units minimizes errors.... and blunders, ie, you do the right solution, then write down the wrong answer.

• The echart component of this course using the free echart program OpenCPN must be worked from a computer, PC or Mac. It will not work from a tablet.

WEATHER COURSE
• Most of the Points to Ponder are answered in the Ask-Me section of the Weather Trainer. See first the ones that were assigned.
• The Weather Trainer software has a very powerful and versatile search engine that can be used to track down specific topics or to look for subject matter.

RADAR COURSE
• Many of the Points to Ponder are addressed in the text of the slides in the Lesson’s Classroom Slides.

CELESTIAL NAVIGATION
• Sight reduction can be tested with the functions in starpath.com/calc or in the free CelestialTools.exe