Good afternoon,
Dr. Redding here. I have been spending a bit more time in the virtual space observing student activities and their interaction with the online courses.
The answer is yes to all three of your assumptions. The quizzes are designed to allow the student to self-evaluate their understanding of content covered. This way, if something is not understood you can go back and redo portions of the course as needed. The quizzes are also a good tool for reviewing content that you understand to bring it to the surface of your mind and to make it easier to recall during the final and state exam. Only the highest quiz score is used to compute the course average. However, each quiz is independently scored, so you see each result whether higher or lower as a quiz is completed. This means, even though you may score lower on a subsequent quiz, it will not lower your overall score in the course.
And, yes, you can stop, log out and then return to the course final exam later.
However, to maximize the learning in the course, focus on the content not the quizzes and treat the final exam in the course as if it were the state exam. If you simply retake quizzes your score will increase, but not necessarily your retention of the content. And if you do well on the final, but stop and restart in the middle, it will not truly represent what you learned or be a trustworthy measure of your mastery of the course content nor accurately indicate your potential performance on the state exam.
Your goal in the course is to gain mastery over the material and to completely learn each section of the course. It is not to score high on quizzes or the final exam. Use them to measure your learning. The state exam is go no-go, so as long as you are confident you can achieve near 90% on it, you should be fine. Most people loose 10% on an exam just because of unfamiliarity with test sites, and the test environment. I suggest going to the test site days ahead of time, and asking for a tour. It will help to improve your score.
Finally, go over the material several times during the days before the state exam and then get a good nights rest before going in for the state exam. Over preparation is preferred to being under-prepared and failing the exam.
Good luck and please let us know how you do.
Terry
Terrence R. Redding, Ph.D.