How to make a graded essay question?

Aug 26, 2011

Dear,

I'd like to know if it is possible with Quizmaker to add a graded essay question. I'd like quiztakers to be able to write an essay that I can grade afterwards. I know many quiztools allow this, but as far as I can see Quizmaker doesn't support these kind of questions. Or am I wrong?

6 Replies
Jeanette Brooks

Hi Stefaan,

How much text are you talking about? Quizmaker has a Fill In the Blank question type, but that really allows for just a string of text; it's not really designed for long answers. The upside of this question type is, you can define the exact answer(s) you're willing to accept, and let Quizmaker do the grading for you.

If that's not quite what you're looking for, there's an ungraded question type called Essay, which allows users to write up to 5,000 characters for their response. The challenge with that is, it's not feasible for Quizmaker to grade something so subjective, which is why it's considered a survey question instead of an essay question. You could certainly use that question type though, and review learners' answers personally once they are submitted, if you're tracking your quiz results through Articulate Online or a Learning Management System. Or, another option for collecting the results is to enable the Email Results button on your quiz results slide, so that learners can send their responses to you via email.

Stefaan Leleu

Hi Jeanette, thanks for the feedback.

My company is currently working with ClassMarker. But we're looking to work with other tools with more possibilities.

If Quizmaker would allow me to grade questions afterwards then it would definitely be my first choice tool to work with. Agreed I can add an ungraded essay question in a test, and grade it myself, but then the results don't show up in the Articulate Online reports.

Hopefully this feature will be included in future versions.

Best regards!

Steve Heinen

This feature would be an awesome addition.  We like to do benchmarking surveys (there are no right or wrong answers) but we do assign point totals based on each answer. I guess it coudl be done by adding a question type to graded quizzes that woudl allow you to assign point totals to more than two answers.  Was a feature request ever submitted and if so will this be considered in either quizmaker or storyline.

Jeanette Brooks

Hi Steve,

Are you wanting to assign point values for an open-ended question (like essay or fill-in-the-blank), and grant points for any answer the user might enter? Currently there's not really a way to do that in Quizmaker, so I'd encourage you to submit a feature request for that ... even if others have already done the same, the more voices the better!

Jeanette Brooks

Hey Steve, thinking a little more about this...it sounds like perhaps all you're looking for is a way to build a multiple-choice question with different score values for each answer. If that's the case, you can totally do that in the current version of Quizmaker. You just need to change the "Score" selector to "By Answer," and that allows you to assign different point values to different responses. You can do the same for feedback too, if you want... you can change the "Feedback" selector to "By Answer" and that way you can provide different feedback text for each answer choice. Here's a screencast that David F created, which walks through how to do it.

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