New Quizzes: Partial Credit for Matching Questions

[yoderr]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

---

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. 

[mbrokowski]

@steelea The situation with Multiple Answer questions is a little different, though I agree that it could be improved. Particularly when a MA question has only a couple of correct answers but many incorrect answers, the scoring becomes quite harsh. But, there is a good reason that incorrect answers lower the score for MA questions: Without it, students would quickly realize that their best approach is to always check every answer. Restated: Without penalizing incorrect answers, there is an "exploit" where checking every single answer guarantees full credit, even if the student knows nothing. So, there must be a penalty for incorrect answers. But, Canvas should allow the instructor to decide what the penalty should be. I have had good results (regrading manually) by applying a ½ point penalty for incorrect answers. If canvas allowed choosing the incorrect answer penalty, then we could discourage the exploit but still mitigate low scores when necessary. That would be an improvement for MA questions.

But, that imrpovement is actually more of a new feature or an upgrade for Multiple Answer questions (they worked the same way in the older quizzes). The partial credit for matching questions is in many ways a worse problem because it removes a feature that was already present and worked fine in the older quizzes. Since (in theory, at least) Canvas is phasing out older quizzes and replacing them with new quizzes, we are essentially getting something with fewer features and something that, for many of us, is unusable. Matching questions in the new quizzes are a downgrade.

[tpaulson]

I am also extremely disappointed to see that this has been requested for 2 1/2 years and is still not fixed. Horrible.  This needs to be escalated and fixed very quickly.  This is one reason why I limit the use of new quizzes

[karvidson]

On Canvas new quizzes, teachers should have the option to award partial credit to students who match some, but not all, of the responses. 

[mathomas]

@steelea @mbrokowski

With Multiple Answer questions, I like to set them up such that each correct choice adds toward 1 & each incorrect choice deducts it's percentage of the overall number of choices. For example, if I create a question with 5 possible answers or which 2 are correct, each of the correct answers would be worth +.5pts and each incorrect choice would be worth -.2pts. Or, if there are 4 choices with 3 correct, the breakdown would be +.333 for correct and -.25 for incorrect.

Doing it that way penalizes for incorrect choices--discouraging just checking everything--but one incorrect doesn't entirely remove the score for a correct choice. Of course, that's not currently possible, but it would be great to be able to fine-tune our scoring. [BTW, I was able to do that back in our Moodle days.]

[susan_baglin]

It is demoralizing to get a nothing for anything less than 100%!

[CANM]

We need partial credit for matching questions!!!!

Why in the world would anyone develop matching without the ability to score correct responses and incorrect responses in a matching????  That makes no sense to me as an educator.

[paul1]

New Quizzes enforced July 2022....c'mon Canvas, this is a basic requirement for matching that even our SIS's little LMS can handle. We're moving everything over to Canvas, but I think we're going to have a lot of unhappy teachers between this and the lack of a clear choice to assign extra credit.

[MrsF20]

Please, please, please fix the grading so that it's not all or nothing in these types of questions on new quizzes. At the moment, every new quiz that uses this question format needs to be graded manually. It is the main reason why I use old quizzes.

[RollieLewis]

Yes, please give partial credit for matching questions! It's not fair that a student gets 0 points on a 10-part matching question for mixing up just two answers. Thank you so much.

[LThornburgh]

I am trying out New Quizzes this summer for my class. I was very disappointed to learn this morning that New Quizzes does not do partial credit for Matching the way Classic Quizzes and Blackboard has done for me in the past. It is counterintuitive to have a self grading reviews and exams where Matching is not given Partial credit. If partial credit is not made an option for New Quizzes I will be forced to use Classic Quizzes because I don't have the time to go through 30+ students quizzes to give them partial credit in 13 reviews and 4 exams.

Is there a timeline to fix this extreme problem/oversite?