When administering Placement Tests to incoming students or students who do not yet have a rostered account with your school, you might be tempted to allow them to take the test as Guest Students.
However, we strongly recommend avoiding Guest Student submissions unless absolutely necessary. Guest submissions can make it difficult to reliably track student data, and their work cannot be easily tied to a permanent student profile later.
Instead, the best practice is to manually create a temporary class and generate manual student accounts with teacher-defined usernames and passwords. This ensures student work is securely saved, easily accessible, and properly organized.
Follow the step-by-step instructions below to set up your temporary placement test class and generate student accounts.
Step 1: Manually Create a Temporary Class
From your Classes tab, click the Create + button, and then select Create a Class. (Alternatively, from your "Home" tab, click "Create +", select "Add Class", and then click "Create a class").
In the pop-up window that opens, enter the details for your temporary class:
Name: Enter a clear name for the class (e.g., "Fall Placement Tests").
Class color & Abbreviation/Icon: Choose a color and abbreviation to help you easily distinguish this temporary class from your regular rostered classes.
Org: Pick your Org! The selected Org should be the one your students' scores should be recorded under.
Finalize the process by clicking the blue Create Class button at the bottom of the window.
Step 2: Manually Create Student Accounts
Once your temporary class has been created, you can create accounts on behalf of your testing students without requiring them to have an email address.
From your Classes tab, click on the title of your newly created class to navigate to the Student Management page.
Click on the Add Students button. A popup window will open.
Set up the accounts using a Username & Password combination:
Enter the student's first and last name.
Enter a username for them. (Note: If the username you've chosen is already taken, you'll get an error message and have to pick a different one).
Set up a password for the student. As long as the password is not weak, you can use any combination you'd like. You can keep it simple for the placement test!
Pro Tip: You can also copy/paste the information from a CSV file to enter multiple students at once.
Click the Add Students button at the bottom of the window to complete the process.
Step 3: Administer the Placement Test
Before the test begins, provide your students with the custom username and password you've created for them. Students will use these credentials to log in to Formative, where they will immediately see your temporary class and be able to take their assigned Placement Test.
IMPORTANT: Shared Devices
If your students are taking the placement test on shared devices (such as in a computer lab or using a shared cart of laptops/tablets), please instruct them to log out of Formative completely as soon as they finish their test.
Why is this important? If a student closes the browser without logging out, the next student to use that device may automatically be placed into the previous student's account. If this happens, the second student might accidentally overwrite the first student's answers, or submit their own placement test under the wrong name. Logging out ensures that every student's work is recorded accurately under their own account.