Hello,
Moodle 3.0
Is there a way of having essay style questions auto-graded? A colleague would like this functionality for formative assessment questions.
Is there a way of having essay style questions auto-graded? A colleague would like this functionality for formative assessment questions.
Not with the quiz activity. Take a look at the Workshop activity. It basically crowd-sources the grading of essays.
The short answer is no. The longer one is what do you mean by auto-graded. In the past people have asked for students to be given some type of grade simply for submitting, which might be considered a type of auto-grading. If you mean you want the computer to assess continuous prose in a similar manner to a teacher then the answer is no, in the same way that automatic subtitling, amazon Alexa and the like are still somewhat short of an average human at interpreting continuous text. If you are interested in marking text by pattern matching e.g. if the question is about domestic cats, give a mark for mentioning fur and mats then there are 3rd party question types that will do that.
Definitely not computer assessed! Rather some type of grade simply for submitting.
But what about the great Gordon Bateson's essay autograde question?
https://github.com/gbateson/moodle-qtype_essayautograde
I think you mean
"But what about the awesome Gordon Bateson's essay autograde question?'
I spoke about that as part of my automatic assessment presentation at the Glasgow Moot this year. It is very impressive. My commentary starts at slide 5 on this presentation
Thank you Marcus Green and Justin Hunt for the suggestion!
And now there is a Moodle Docs page for this awesome plugin at https://docs.moodle.org/34/en/question/type/essayautograde.
The plugin works with English and Spanish languages.
It even has one example on auto-grading a pathology question (enclosed).
The essay (autograde) question type allows an essay question response to be given a preliminary grade that is generated automatically based on one or more of the following characteristics of the response.
- the number of words in the response
- the number of characters in the response
- the presence of one or more target phrases in the response
The automatic grade can be overridden by the teacher later.
Additionally, the teacher can set up grading bands that offer a non-linear grading scheme. In such a scheme, the grade awarded is that of the grading band in which the word/character count falls.
Gordon Bateson has recently made a couple of very teacher-friendly improvements to his Essay(auto-grade) question type and it is now an 'even more awesome' plugin.
And it has been tested to work just as well in English and in Spanish. It will likely work fine in all other left-to-right languages.
You can download the new code at his GitHub site.
And there is a Moodle Docs page for this plugin. that illustrates how to show/hide an example essay for a question (we hope this feature will soon be incorporated as a clickable checkbox+text_window).
Gordon Bateson has just made some extremely student-friendly and teacher-friendly
improvements to his Essay(auto-grade) question type and it is now an 'even more powerful, friendly and awesome' plugin.
And
it has been tested to work just as well in English and in Spanish. It
will likely work fine in all other left-to-right languages.
You can download the new code at his GitHub site.
And there is an updated, fully illustrated, Moodle Docs page for this plugin. that shows step-by step how to make an example question with a demo answer and a link to a glossary of common errors.
And Marcus Green has agreed to work on making this plugin work in the Mobile App.