Student FAQ/Helptext and Troubleshooting Support
Instructions on using the CATME system and common technical difficulties CATME users face.
To learn more about what CATME is, visit our "About" page
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Student Account Access
Your student account can be converted into a Dual Access Account, which will allow you to have both student and instructor functionality. To request a Dual Access account, two steps are needed:
- The student(s) requesting the account must email support@catme.org asking for his/her account(s) to be converted. Information about the instructor the student(s) will be a TA in and the email of the student account(s) should be provided.
- The instructor overseeing the student TA(s) must also send an email to support@catme.org to verify the account conversion request(s).
NOTE: CATME will not allow a student to be a TA for a class he/she is participating in as a student (involved in an active survey).
Forgot Password Form
If you enter your email address into this form, the system will send you an email containing a special link that will allow you to reset your password. This email is similar to the one you received when your account was initially created in the system (although the link in the email is different). If you’ve lost (or never received) this email when your account was created, you may use this “Forgot Password” form to create your initial password in the system.
You MUST enter the exact email address that was used when your account was originally created. The system will not alert you if an incorrect email address is used– you will simply not receive any email. If you have multiple email addresses and are not sure which one was used to create your account, simply try entering each address into the form until one of them works. Student users should also be able to ask their instructor for the correct email address.
Create (or Reset) Password Form
This screen is used to set your initial password in the system or reset a forgotten password. You will arrive at this screen by following a link in an email sent to you from our automated system. This link contains a special embedded security code that must be reproduced exactly for this page to function properly. So if you are using “cut and paste” to extract the link from the email message, be sure to capture the complete link.
The form requires that you enter the exact email address that was used when your account was originally created. This email address will be specified in the email message that included the link to get you to this form. The combination of the unique security code embedded in the page link and your correct email address authorizes you to reset the password on the account.
Please enter your new password twice for verification. Passwords must contain at least six characters and may be made up of letters, numbers, and even punctuation and symbols like “@” and “=”.
If the password update is successful, you will automatically be logged into the system and taken to your system “home page”. The new password you entered is now your permanent system password and can be used on the system login page from this point forward. You DO NOT need to visit the “Create New Password” screen again once you have set up your initial password.
If you wish to change your password in the future, log into the system using your current password click the appropriate button in the upper-right corner of your system home page (“Change Password” for students, or “My Profile” for faculty users).
- You should have received an email from the CATME system telling you how to set up their account. If you didn’t receive the email, these are the most common reasons.
- The message is in the junk or spam folder of your email account.
- You received the e-mail but didn’t know what it was and deleted it.
- Your software or email server is blocking the CATME IP addresses. Your ISP has to permit catme.org. This is relevant if you are working from a home computer or an off-campus server. Try moving to a campus computer and logging in from there.
In any case, go to the main page and click the “Forgot your password?” link. You should enter the email your professor/institution uses to contact you, and CATME will email you a URL link to reset your account password. This is a good test to see if you can receive CATME emails.
Students
Your account will be created automatically as soon as your instructor begins using the system for your class. You will receive an email message with instructions on how to set your initial password. If you did not receive this email for some reason, you can use the “Forgot your password?” link to set up a new password.
All CATME account passwords must:
Contain 1 letter
Contain either 1 number or 1 punctuation mark
Contain at least 4 unique characters
Be at least 8 characters
Passwords MAY NOT contain:
Your first name e.g. (Julius11!)
Your last name e.g. (Caesar11!)
The word CATME e.g. (CATME11!)
For more info, watch our video on Account Password Guidelines.
For more info, watch our video on Account Password Guidelines.Annually, all existing passwords will have to be changed. Even if your existing password is compliant with the new requirements you will still need to change your password annually.
No, when you change your password you cannot use any of your previous 3 passwords.
If you wait to until after the deadline to change your password, once you log in to your account you will be directed to the My Profile page and will stay there until you enter your new password and it follows CATME’s password guidelines.
Instructions
Your instructor creates your CATME student account. You enter your password into CATME to gain access to your CATME student account. You need to click on the link in the CATME message that was sent to your email address. Once you are there, enter your password. Then go to the login screen/popup and enter the email address that your instructor used to create your account and enter your password.
If you did not receive or ignored the ‘create your password’ CATME message, go to the login screen. Enter your email address as your name and click on forgot password. Follow the instructions in the CATME message that you receive to finish entering your password.
Check your junk mail folder or permit catme.org to send you email messages.
When you hover your mouse over the names of the students while answering the questions during rater practice, you can read about the descriptions that was provided about them in the beginning of the rater practice.
Additionally, hovering your mouse over the red/blue or green arrows tells you about why the answer is correct/incorrect.
Student Interface
Welcome to the CATME System! One or more of your instructors has chosen this system to gather information from you and your classmates. There are several different types of activities you may be asked to participate in:
Team-Maker Activities
These activities gather demographic information (times you are available to meet, gender, race, academics and interests, etc) in order to help your instructors form more optimal teams for class exercises. Once the instructor has used this data to form teams, you will be able to see a summary with the names and email addresses of the other members of your team, along with a schedule grid showing when the various members of your team are available to meet to work on projects as a group.
Peer-Evaluation Activities
These activities allow you to give feedback on your own performance and the performance of your teammates on various class projects. After your instructor has reviewed the results, you will receive feedback on how your ratings compare to the average ratings for the rest of your team.
You will see your personal summary page every time you log into the system. This page lists (in chronological order) all of the activities that you have taken or will be taking. Each activity is only “active” for a limited period of time defined by your instructor: you will receive a reminder via email at the beginning of the activity period, and another reminder 48 hours before the end of the activity period if you have not yet completed the activity. Please be sure to fill out each activity during the required activity period.
When an activity is “active” you will see a “Complete Activity” link in red next to the activity name. After you have completed the activity, this link will disappear and you will notice that the “End Date” field indicates that you have “Submitted” the activity. You are not allowed to change your activity answers once you have completed the activity unless your instructor explicitly allows you to do so.
After your instructor has reviewed the data from all students, they will release this data back to the students. You will receive another email from the system when this happens. When you log back in to the system you will see a “Team Info” or “View Results” link next to the activity name, which will take you to a summary page with your results.
Your instructor may choose to share data collected from this activity with faculty at other universities who are studying peer evaluation methods and instruments under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. Your name and other “personally identifiable information” will be removed from the data before it is released for these purposes– you will have complete confidentiality.
Note that at any time you can click the Help link in the upper-right corner of the screen will display this page of help text. Logout will log you out of the system (exiting your browser will also log you out automatically). If you would like to change your login password for the system, simply use the “Change Password” button in the upper-right corner of your personal summary page.
Peer-Evaluation Activity
The main portion of the activity asks you to rate yourself and your teammates based on several different types of behavior. On each screen, you will see different behavioral descriptions and you should select the descriptions that best fit each member of your team. If you feel that a given person matched behaviors from two different categories, you may select the “Demonstrates behaviors described above and below” choice.
To rate an individual team member, find the column on the left-hand side of each screen that is labeled with that person’s name– your name will always appear in the leftmost column, and your fellow team members will be listed after you in alphabetical order. Click the button in each column that most closely matches that person’s behavior.
You must rate all team members before being allowed to proceed to the next screen. However, you may back up to previous screens without completing the screen you’re on. You can move between the different pages by clicking on the navigation bar at the top of the page or using the “<< Back” and “Next >>” buttons in the upper-right corner of each screen. For best results please use one of these methods rather than the forward/back buttons on your web browser.
Team-Maker Activity
The purpose of this type of activity is to gather personal information about you which will assist your instructor in forming more optimal teams for class projects. Please answer all questions as accurately as possible. You must answer all questions before you can proceed. You can move between the different pages of the activity by using the buttons or the navigation bar at the top of the page.
There is a wide variety of different questions that may appear on this activity. You will often be asked to enter information about when you are BUSY and NOT ABLE to meet with the other members of your team. Check the boxes on the schedule grid to indicate the days and times that you are busy:
- Note that you can use the buttons along the top (labeled with the days of the week) and along the left side (labeled with the hours of the day) to turn an entire column or row of check boxes on and off. Sometimes, for example, it’s easier to busy out an entire day and then uncheck the few hours during that day when you are able to meet.
- Similarly, the “Make Busy” button in the upper-left corner of the grid will check all of the boxes in the table. You can then un-check the times that you are free to meet.
The Team-Maker software looks for large blocks of free time when all members of the team are able to meet. So if your blocks of free time don’t exactly begin and end exactly on the hour, go ahead and mark hours that you’re partially free as being “busy”. Team-Maker will look for the best fit from the remaining, fully open hours in your schedule.
It is in your best interests to answer the schedule question as accurately as possible. If you attempt to “game the system” by marking times as busy when you are actually available to meet, you run the risk of being assigned to a team whose other members have schedules that are incompatible with yours.
Rater Practice
Interface calibration provides you with an opportunity to practice using the Peer Evaluation interface and learn how to correctly apply the rating system to actual behaviors. Your instructor may require you to practice once, not at all or until you can show mastery of the rating standards. You may also choose to practice at any time using the “Rater Practice” button on your home screen.
After the initial welcome screen, a second screen displays descriptions of four members of a hypothetical team, you will use the information provided in the descriptions to rate the various students as you proceed through the training instrument (at any point in the instrument, you may simply roll your mouse over the student’s name to see the descriptive text for the student). Rate each student by clicking on the button next to the descriptive text that best matches that student’s behavior– there is one column of buttons for each of the students in the hypothetical team, and that column is labeled with the student’s name. Note the “Demonstrates behaviors described immediately above and below.” choice for students whose behaviors seem to straddle the various behavioral descriptions.
You must completely rate all students for a given set of behaviors before being allowed to proceed to the next behavioral category (this is a requirement for the actual Peer Evaluation activities as well). You may back up to a previous category without completing a given screen. For best results, please use the “<< Back” and “Next >>” buttons in the upper-right corner of the activity form or the various buttons on the navigation bar rather than your browser’s forward/back buttons.
After completing the instrument, you will be given feedback on how closely your assessment of the hypothetical team members matched the research team’s assessment. Green arrows indicate that your assessment matched that of the research team, while red arrows indicate a discrepancy (the research team’s opinion is indicated with the red arrow, while your entry is marked with blue). Roll your mouse over the green or red arrows for further information.
Examine the descriptor phrases and select the radio button to the left of the behavioral description that best describes the behavior of your teammate for each of the five dimensions of team-member contributions that your instructor assigned.
Choose one of the two radio buttons that say “Demonstrates behaviors described immediately above and below” for in-between ratings. Use these when you feel that the person you are rating displayed behaviors in both the middle behavioral description and either the description at the top or bottom of the page.
Troubleshooting
If you completed the CATME survey before the closing date your data is available to your instructor.
We are unable to view student data. We suggest that you ask your instructor to reopen the survey for you.
If you do not see your instructor’s CATME survey, you are not logging in with the email address that your instructor used in his CATME survey or your instructor has not started their CATME survey. Contact your instructor to confirm the email he/she used to create your student account in the CATME database and to verify that your instructor’s CATME survey has started.
Email your professor and ask them to re-open the survey for you. Make sure to complete the entire survey when it is re-opened.
If the students on your Peer Evaluation survey are not your real teammates, then your professor has added a Rater Calibration Practice to your survey. This is a way to practice completing a Peer Evaluation survey using fictitious team members before rating your own team members.
Email your professor and ask them to re-open the Team-Maker survey for you. Revise your schedule promptly when it is re-opened.
If you don’t receive email messages from CATME, these are the most common reasons.
- CATME messages are in the junk or spam folder of the your email account.
- Your software or email server is blocking the CATME IP addresses. Your ISP has to permit catme.org. This is relevant if you are working from a home computer or an off-campus server. Try moving to a campus computer and logging in from there.
In any case, go to the main page and click the “Forgot your password?” link. You should enter the email your professor/institution uses to contact you, and CATME will email you a URL link to reset your account password. This is a good test to see if you can receive CATME emails.
Viewing Results
Peer-Evaluation Results
The behavioral descriptions you saw when using the activity to rate yourself and your teammates are repeated here on the activity results screen. Notice, however, that for each group of behaviors the small blue arrows show how your self-rating compares to your average rating from the other members of your team and how those ratings compare to the overall average ratings across all members of your team. Also, the results for all behavioral categories are shown on one screen, rather than being spread out across multiple screens as they were in the original activity.
In some cases, the system may have noticed an “exceptional condition” in the activity data from your team. When this happens, you will see an additional informational message at the top of your results.
If you have questions about your results, please contact your instructor(s).
Team-Maker Results
This screen is designed to introduce you to the other members of your team and show you when there are opportunities to get together to work on your project as a group.
The first part of the screen displays the names and email addresses of the other members of your team. You may click on each email address to send an email to that person.
The lower half of the display shows the weekly schedule grid and what percentage of the team is available to meet during any given hour– in other words, the “100%” hours are the times when your team should all be able to get together as a group. For the hours where only part of the team is available to meet, you can hover your mouse over that hour to see the names of a team members that are available to meet during that hour.
Other Questions
“Invalid Credentials” means that you are not using the email address your instructor used to create your CATME student account. Obtain the email address that your instructor used to create your CATME student account and then enter your password into the CATME database.
Log onto your account and click My Profile button on your home screen. You then can select your timezone in the Timezone slot on your screen.
Your timezone will automatically default to your instructor’s time zone.
Your student schedule will be displayed in the time zone you specified. Your instructor will assign you to sign up for your availability, and you will input your availability according to your time zone. You will view your schedule based on your own time zone, and your team will view their schedules based on their corresponding time zones. You will be notified if your timezone is different from your instructor’s.
