New Quizzes: Partial Credit for Matching Questions

[yoderr]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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In new quizzes, there needs to be the ability to award partial credit for matching questions. At the current moment, it is either all or nothing. I know you can "fudge" points at the end, but we need the ability to make each matching item worth points. 

[BCheung]

YES! ive had to regrade EVERY single question when students are doing these. Even if standardized testing counts them wrong, the identification that they have part of the answer correct helps them to learn how to identify all the correct answers in the future.

[BeckyH]

Our district would also like to see partial credit for New Quizzes, too. New to Canvas this year and having parents complain about their student earning zero when part of the answer is correct. Thanks for considering this request.

[dukej1]

This needs to happen. I too am grading each one by hand because a 10 item matching question should not be all or nothing.

[seinunddasein]

In the very demanding task of converting from Moodle to Canvas, I have just discovered that Matching questions do not award partial credit for individual answers.This is an oversight on the part of Canvas which causes me to question whether instructors were ever consulted on the development of quizzes.  It also appears that one cannot assign a global score to a quiz with it left up to Canvas to calculate the values of individual questions as could be done in Moodle..  In this respect, also, Moodle is superior.  I do give Canvas points for Speed Grader and Rubrics, but it remains to be seen whether these are worth the extra inconvenience that these oversights are causing me.  Would it be that much of a challenge for programmers to work on improving Quizzes in these respects?

[Steven_S]

@seinunddasein  To assign a global score to your quiz that is not created by totaling the question values, use "new" quizzes. 

You may need to turn that feature option on in your course settings, but once it is on you will be prompted to choose between a classic quiz and a new quiz when you make your next quiz.  From your quizzes tab, you can also select "migrate" to transform each classic quiz into a new quiz.

When using new quizzes, the value you set for the quiz by selecting edit from the quiz's three dot menu on the assignment tab (specifically) will be a global value for the quiz.  No matter how many questions you add or subtract, the quiz score will be a percent of that value.  You will have the option to leave your questions at 1 point each, or to weight them differently, and canvas will do the math to convert the total earned from the quiz questions (out of the total points available in the questions) proportionately into the appropriate score out of the global value that you set in assignment settings.

Partial credit for matching needs to be added, and I believe that step is in progress.  It was already available in classic quizzes, and you may still use classic quizzes for now.  There is an option in "new" quizzes that comes close, however:  Fill-in-the-blank questions allow multiple blanks and already award partial credit for the multiple blanks.  Also, the fill-in-the-blank settings include drop downs and a word bank.  The word bank can be used to recreate the effect of a matching question, because students will click and drag words from a shared bank into each of the blanks.  Just write the entire prompt then highlight the words that are blanks and click enter.  The options for your blank will show up once you have a blank. 

(Using enter to create a blank makes it hard to format your prompts in a list for matching.  Try copying and pasting from word, or just blank = description, blank = description, etc)

A caution about word banks:  You will need to enter incorrect options, just like you would for a drop down, and those incorrect options should not be a correct option for any other blank.  There is no way to distinguish which word in the bank came from which blank, and canvas will not (yet) recognize that the correct word was selected if it came from the options for a different blank. 

Another caution about the incorrect options with word bank questions:  The blanks will still display a drop down when clicked, and so students who notice that can narrow the options to the length of the list of possible answers that you enter for each blank.

It is not a perfect solution to due to those flaws, but multiple blanks in a fill in the blank question will at least assign partial credit.   

[tomjohnson189]

A 1,000 "agree" votes!  Please allow credit for each match the student got right.

[dheup]

It's a feature in multiple-choice questions, which I think is less likely than matching for needing it. I will be waiting to hear that this is implemented.

[mathomas]

This lack of basic functionality is the main reason that I don't use the new quiz feature.

[clarnold]

It makes me irrationally angry every time I think about training my teachers on the new quizzes having to explain about the partial credit. You give us so many amazing new features that essentially we can't use.

I don't get how an educational company can't realize how this is going to play out in the K-12 environment. The moment some kid takes a test with these new questions and it looks like they bombed it because the questions don't award partial credit immediately, some raging parent is going to go ballistic on the teacher, the school, and subsequently me. So, I am already planning on just writing the priority team's email on the board during training and tell my teachers that's where to direct their complaints, and If I do get an angry parent, they are getting that email as well. I'm not going to deal with it.

[tylercooperECA]

Please bring this functionality to new quizzes - matching is almost useless without partial credit as a signficant number of students can get most of a matching question correct, but cannot get them all correct.  The lack of ability to machine grade this way has made me need to hand correct 100s of quizzes because I and the students need to grant partial credit.