Quiz

Hi Angel,

that´s an interesting topic, especially when switching from paper to electronic tests.

[giving negative grades for questions]
To be honest, we simply don´t do it because the worst result for a test is "zero". As a consequence: If the worst possible quiz result is zero, negative questions grades don´t make sense.

[partial credits]
We don´t give partial credits, because this ends up in endless discussions with students about how to value a correct or a wrong answer. In your example: Why is one correct answer = +100%, whereas one wrong answer is -33%? Or: if you have three wrongs answers, one of those is -33%, where in another question you may have two wrong answers, so any of those is -50% ?!?!?!

If you switch from paper to "e", the first question from students and teachers is always how to give credits to "ungiven incorrect answers", because this system is often used on paper (example: five answers: three correct, two incorrect; each answer = 0.2 credits, correct if checked, uncorrect if unchecked). But this seems to be inpossible in electronic systems? 

We simply use multiple choice with four options and only one is completely correct and gives +100%. The other three are incorrect or at least partially incorrect and give 0%. We give differentiated feedback for any answer. Since we use this we don´t have any discussion about partial credits.

Cheers, Marcus

One idea would be to add a 5th option: "Don't answer" with 33% credit.

This would make it similar to the SAT test:
Correct = 100%
Don't Answer = 25%
Wrong = 0%

You might need to tweak the numbers a little bit, and I'm not sure this will do quite what you want, but I think with these numbers, random guessing should balance out at the 25% mark for a grade, which seems to be your goal (though you were aiming at 0% for random guesses).

Does this work for you?

Here is a possible workaround which may at least allow you to display the desired mark in the grades report even if the quiz itself doesn't show that desired mark.

10 multiple choice questions, each one with an unique right answer
Each right answer means +10 (100% for a 10 point question)
Each wrong answer means +1 (10% for a 10 point question)
Each unanswered question means 0

The actual quiz grade item should be hidden and there should be a mirror grade item which takes the score of the quiz and pass it to a formula such as

=(||quiz||-mod(||quiz||,10)-(mod(||quiz||,10)*3.3))/10

So with your example of 7 right answers, 2 wrong answers and 1 question without answer the quiz score will be 72 but the calculated score will be:

(72-2-(2*3.3))/10=63.4/10=6.34

In the case of 3 right answers, 5 wrong answers and 2 question without answer the quiz score will be 35 but the calculated score will be:

(35-5-(5*3.3))/10=13.5/10=1.35

Some further fine-tuning may allow this approach to work also for the extreme case of all wrong answers.

Thank you for the ideas of workarounds. I had also thought something similar. I just wanted to see if there was a way I couldn't find to get Moodle do that automatically, without workarounds, but I guess there is no way (at least by the moment).

Thanks again,

Angel