New Quizzes: Partial Credit for Matching Questions

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. 

337 Comments
klhouser
Community Novice

there is a comically large design-flaw in new quizzes: students either get all the matching or none of them.

So they must get correct all 30 matching pairs. If they get 20 right they get zero.

Ordering questions have a similar problem.

In general, this suggests absolutely no one consulted an instructor when putting this out. So there may be larger problems with how these features are/are not vetted.

 

mwolfenstein
Community Participant

@klhouserI believe the Canvas team is working on doing better around the bigger issue you're raising (e.g. gathering data from end users to effectively inform design and development), but that might just be optimism on my part. My take is that a partially developed feature like this is almost worse than not having the feature at all.

ywright
Community Novice

100%! This was an option in the old quizzes. PLEASE bring it back!! 

c_p_jobling
Community Explorer

I came across this "feature" today! I note partial credit was available in "old" quizzes and I would have expected new quizzes to be at least feature compatible with the existing tool. Plus, it seems that this issue was first raised as long ago as March 2018!

mindy_timothy
Community Member

I know the new quiz format is an LTI, but if that is the route that canvas is taking they HAVE to make it more user friendly.  It has sOOOO many steps and then to add the partial credit problem to the mix, it adds problems instead of making teaching easier.  PLease PLEASE fix this. 

bruce_hastie
Community Explorer

Agreed.  Matching, sorting, and all of the other multi-part answers should at least give the option for points for each rather than all or nothing.

hammyteach
Community Member

Let teachers have the ability to give partial credit for the matching parts the students got correct instead of an all or nothing type question.

Steven_S
Community Champion

I agree that partial credit should be an option for any question that requests multiple responses from students.  Even though the matching question does not do that right now, there is a way to make partial credit matching questions in New Quizzes, it just isn't the most instinctive path and the labeling does not really tell you what to expect. 

Instead of selecting a multiple choice question, select a fill-in-the-blank question type, because that question type does use partial credit automatically.  Then make multiple blanks, (type a word, highlight it, and click enter for each blank), and settings for each blank will allow you to select the "word bank" option.  The result will be the words you select from every blank together in a single word bank box that students will see on the same page as the question.  To respond to the question, students need to click and drag words from the word bank box into the blanks you create. 

From the guide:

Each blank space is given a point value calculated by dividing the total points possible by the number of blank spaces. Correct answer choices are awarded this point value and no points are subtracted for incorrect answers. For example, a Fill in the Blank question with four blanks that is worth 1 point would assign a point value of 0.25 to each blank. If a student selects two correct answers and two incorrect answers, they would be awarded a total of 0.50 points for the question.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-create-a-Fill-in-the-Blank-question-in-...

dwortman
Community Member

How has this been an issue for OVER TWO YEARS and nothing has been done about it!  Stop adding new features and fix the features you already have!  How can you not give partial credit for matching questions?!  There are 1000s of teachers begging for this functionality.  Fix it. 

Why would you remove functionality from old quizzes when creating new quizzes?

yssman
Community Member

Baffled; just baffled.