Moodle in English: Important problem that i've come across with quizzes

Important problem that i've come across with quizzes

by Graham Stone - Tuesday, 23 December 2003, 11:25 PM

I think that the quiz section of Moodle is great with lots of options but I have come across a major problem which has also been reported to me by users of the VLE that I have set up. The problem revolves around short answer questions because someone might give a correct answer but it is marked wrong because they have'nt answerd it exactly as the answer that I put when creating the question

e.g I created a quiz about computer security and one of the questions was about anti virus software and in the answer a pupil called it virus checking software which was marked wrong so I was wondering if there is any way of getting the computer to pick out certain words from an answer.

I look forward to your help on this matter because people are complaining to me about it and apart from this I think that Moodle is great.

Keep up the good work

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Re: Important problem that i've come across with quizzes

by Paul Shew - Wednesday, 24 December 2003, 8:46 AM

The way short answer questions are set up now, the students must input a valid answer *exactly* as it's listed. There's currently no way to specify an answer with pattern recognition or boolean logic. (i.e., contains "virus" AND contains "software")

But there are ways to work around this. When I use short answer questions, I provide several likely answers. Moodle supports up to six. I include likely misspellings among the correct short answers, sometimes with reduced credit.

So, for example, you might list the following as valid answers to your question:
anti-virus software
anti virus software
antivirus software
virus software
virus checking software

Although I've never done it myself, I think it's possible to add correct answers retrospectively. After the test is over, add answers to the question, and then re-grade the quiz.

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Re: Important problem that i've come across with quizzes

by Thomas Robb - Wednesday, 24 December 2003, 1:29 PM

One thing that could be done less than 10 lines of programming (probably) is to allow wild cards in the possible answers. Using an asterisk, for example, you could specify this:

*virus * software

This would match, for the first word, anything ending in "virus", for the second word anything at all (or nothing), and for the third word, only "software". Thus in one specification, you could allow for all of what Paul has specified using five separate answers:

anti-virus software
anti virus software
antivirus software
virus software
virus checking software

If you found, for example, that students misspell "ware" as "wear" then specifying "softw*r*" would allow for any word that started with "softw" and had an "r" somewhere later on.

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