Quiz problem: "Answer 2 out of 3 questions"

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tbreitbarth
Community Novice

Would it be possible to set-up the following quiz (or, possibly, other assessment format in Canvas) and not run into problems with marking/point allocation?

Students are given N number of questions randomly drawn from a question pool, but are supposed to only answer N-x of those questions (e.g. "Answer TWO of the following three questions. All answers are 10 points.").

The issue is that while it is possible to set-up the above scenario, this appears to unavoidably cause problems in the marking stage. With all answers worth a certain number of points, there appears to be no setting for Canvas to "ignore" the question students have chosen not to answer.

E.g. a student scores 8/10 for Q1, 2/10 for Q2, and does not answer Q3. Without a magic setting that I am not yet aware of (neither do our local experts), Canvas calculates it as 10/30 (33%) while it should be 10/20 (50%). 

Any ideas and solutions appreciated. Thank you.

1 Solution
James
Community Champion

 @tbreitbarth  

There is no magic setting that you're missing. Canvas does not support this workflow without workarounds.

In your case, it you will need to use manual grading (unless you can write a script that will download the results of the quiz and calculate the grade automatically).

In Legacy Quizzes, the points on the quiz are determined by the points on the questions inside the quiz. This means that if you want the quiz to be worth 20 points, you will need to adjust the points within the quiz to total 20 points (6.67, 6.67, and 6.66 points each).

You could adjust the fudge points for the quiz but then you have to do calculations based on their current score and their desired score.

It would probably be easier to use a weighted gradebook and put the quiz into an assignment group worth 0% of the grade. Then, in the assignment group where the quiz would go, put in a fake assignment with no submission to hold the final grade for the quiz. This can easily be changed to be however many points you want the quiz to be worth.

Then, you manually grade each quiz using SpeedGrader and calculate how many points they should get. You enter this into the Gradebook -- SpeedGrader will be looking the quiz.  You could also open SpeedGrader in two browser tabs if you like.

You will need to educate your students to what is going on so they are not confused. 

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