If I set a word limit for a quiz essay question and students go over the limit, can I still read their full response?
Hello @GiseldaBeaudin ...
I did some testing in my own sandbox course. I am assuming that you are using the New Quizzes interface. The short answer is, yes, you will still be able to see the student's full typed essay even if it exceeds the maximum word count that you had established. For example, if you take a look at my attached example, you'll see that I made a New Quiz with a single essay question that required a minimum of five words and a maximum of ten words. Obviously, I went way over ten words when I submitted this as a Test Student. But, when I returned to my instructor view of the New Quiz and viewed the submission in the SpeedGrader, I was able to see the entire paragraph I had pasted in from the Cupcake Ipsum paragraph generator website.
I hope this will be of some help to you! Sing out if you have any questions...thanks!
Thanks for confirming that responses over the word limit are still visible in SpeedGrader—super helpful. I do want to add that, while setting a word limit on essay questions is useful as a guideline, Canvas currently allows submissions even when the maximum word count is exceeded. Doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose of having a strict word limit if enforcement is yet another manual task for an instructor to complete?
On a related note, I’ve noticed there’s a warning when students exceed the maximum word count, but there’s no notification or indicator when the minimum word count is or isn’t met. In cases where a word range is a requirement, it would make more sense if meeting it was necessary for submission—or at the very least flagged in the interface for both students and instructors. But again, even if it was flagged, it would be yet another manual task for the instructor to do.
This also ties into a broader need: it would be incredibly useful to have some kind of auto-grade function for essay responses, especially in high-enrollment courses or low-stakes assessments where you just want to grade for completion (e.g., a simple complete/incomplete flag if students meet the basic submission criteria). This would save instructors a lot of time
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Ideas/Assignments-Automatic-Grading/idi-p/359005/page/5#comments
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/New-Quizzes-auto-grade-open-responses/idi-p/370217
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