Add metadata to tests & question banks in the October Ultra Release

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 10:51:49 -0400
assessments, blackboard, question-banks, ultra-experience, ultra-update

The October Ultra release is a lightweight update featuring a valuable feature for faculty assessment management, allowing easier reuse of test questions and question banks.

Instructors can now tag test questions with metadata to organize and manage questions more effectively across tests, forms, and question banks. When creating or editing a question, you can enable metadata and assign one or more tags -- either by selecting from existing tags or creating your own. These tags make it easier to filter questions when reusing them or building pools, and metadata is preserved when content is copied from Original to Ultra. While tags are hidden from students, they offer a powerful way for instructors to label concepts, learning outcomes, or skills, supporting faster content alignment and more purposeful assessment building over time.

Image 1: Instructors can create and apply a tag to questions.

Students now have a more intuitive experience with fill-in-the-blank questions, which are displayed inline with surrounding text, whether presented as a sentence, paragraph, or table. This update ensures better readability and contextual clarity for students as they complete these question types, especially in assessments that test reading comprehension, vocabulary, or technical knowledge through embedded blanks.

Image 2: After this update, fill-in-the-blanks appear in line with the question.

Additional updates for October include:

Instructors must first add at least one question to a form before they can make it visible to students. Release conditions cannot be set until the form includes questions. This ensures that students only access complete and purposeful assessments.

The Save and Cancel actions are now standardized across several assessment settings pages.

When you can expect the update

Faculty should see the latest updates in their Ultra courses around October 2-3 2025. The next update to our Ultra test environment will take place on October 7, 2025; release notes are posted to the What's New in Ultra that same week. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Please watch the FAQs, including the What's New with Ultra page, and myUMBC for additional information about Ultra.