correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Keith Landa -
Number of replies: 11

Moodle version: Moodle 3.3.4+ (Build: 20180118)

I'm working with a French instructor who is using short answer questions to test student grammar and composition.  She provides a prompt that has a definite correct response, and provides alternate correct answers to cover the possible responses from students (with or without a period at the end of the sentence, etc).  This worked fine for short phrases, but is running into problems with longer sentence answers.  See attached screen shot.  I've looked at a number of the responses that have been marked as incorrect, and cannot see any deviation from the correct answer.  What's more confusing is that other students submitting the same response have had their answers marked correct.

Has anyone seen similar problems?  I thought it might have something to do with the accented characters in the answers.  Any suggestions as to what we can try to make sure these type of short answer questions for our foreign language classes are scored correctly?  Thanks.


(Edited by Mary Cooch - original submission Friday, 9 March 2018, 2:58 PM)

Attachment foreign language quiz.png
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In reply to Keith Landa

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Keith Landa -

Actually, I see that the example I happened to take the screen shot of doesn't have any accented characters, so I guess that's not the problem.  kl

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In reply to Keith Landa

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Mary Cooch -
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Are you able to export some of the problem questions (or at least this one) and upload to here so we could take a look 'behind the scenes'? And you are quite sure that answers with and without full stops/periods are accepted?

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Keith Landa -

Here's a Moodle XML export of the question bank category containing problem questions.

Some of the incorrectly graded questions include:

  • aller à l'école à pied
  • adorer mes institutrices
  • aimer beaucoup les activités en classe
  • s'amuser avec mes camarades pendant la récréation
  • attendre l'été avec impatience
  • aller à l'église à 9h
  • se promener dans la forêt l'après-midi

I was going to copy in what the student responded that were marked as incorrect, but I don't seem to be able to select the text of the student answer, whether I'm reviewing the attempt as the student, the instructor, or as Moodle admin.  But to my eye, the student answers all appear to match the correct answer text, and these are all questions that the instructor then manually override to mark the student answers as correct.

My understanding is that I would see a different set of mis-graded questions if I were to review the attempt for a different student.

Thanks for looking into this.  keith

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In reply to Keith Landa

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Mary Cooch -
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Hmm.. well I have to say I have tried the quiz, or several questions of the quiz a number of times now and with different possibilities (full stop, none, lower/upper case) but I haven't managed to get one wrong in the way that the students appear to have. I'll keep trying and pondering though...

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Tim Hunt -
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I think the problem is with the difference between ' and ʼ. (If that difference is not visible in your browser, zoom in a lot).

Should we make Moodle ignore those differences always?

Probably not, some people use Moodle to teach programming and other technical things where the exact character matters.

Should we add an option for this? Not sure.

In the mean time, you can handle this manually. Edit the question, and add an additional answer worth 100% with the other sort of apostrophe.


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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Keith Landa -

Thanks for the feedback everyone - very helpful, and I will pass it all along to the instructor.

I assume the student responses are stored in mdl_quiz_attempts?  I thought I would download the responses for this quiz to a file where I can inspect the responses more closely and confirm if the issue is students using characters that appear to be correct but are the different unicode characters.  Thx.  k

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In reply to Keith Landa

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

If you want to download responses, why not use Quiz -> results -> responses in the Moodle UI?

If you really want to get the data directly from the database, you need to use a query like this one: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Overview_of_the_Moodle_question_engine#Detailed_data_about_an_attempt

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Keith Landa -

Thanks Tim.  I wanted to use Moodle Adminer to download a bulk CSV file with student responses, rather than look at quiz attempts one by one, in order to take the responses into Excel to do some matching.  I found the responses to one of the regraded questions in mdl_question_attempts, imported them in Excel, and used the Exact function to identify the mismatches, so I can share with the instructor what some of the subtle mismatches were.

I think the take-home message for the instructor is that there are so many subtle 'mismatches' possible that she will need to be very intentional and complete about what acceptable answers she includes when writing the questions.

Thanks again everyone.  k

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In reply to Keith Landa

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Keith Landa -

The instructor has had to go in to manually mark the answers as correct, after Moodle marked them as incorrect.

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In reply to Keith Landa

Re: correct short answers marked incorrect for French language quizzes

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Hello Mary and Keith.

Could the problem be the french "apostrophe" character

There are several different characters that can be used and some of them are very difficult to distinguish on screen but of course as their unicode coding is different the shortanswer question will not consider them as equivalent .

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