How to do zero-point, ungraded, freeform questions that accompany specific-answer questions

arencambre

I have a test (new quiz) that asks students to do some computational or mathematical process and come up with a few specific answers. This is a fill-in-the-blank question. This can be the result of a mathematical, coding, or analytical process. In my case, it is a SQL query.

I follow up each of these with an essay question that is essentially "show your work". Currently, I configure this as an essay question with 0 points. In my case, the student pastes the SQL query used to come up with the prior question's answers. My intent with the second question is to see the student's work, so that I can both verify originality and to provide partial credit where warranted. I do not wish to grade this question. I just want it there so that I can add points back to make up for missed points in the prior question. E.g., if the prior, fill-in-the-blank question is worth 10 points and the student was given 0 points, then on the essay question, if I find it worthy of partial credit, I may bump it up from 0/0 points to, say, 5/0 points.

There are two things I wish would happen:

1. The essay question must have an entry for the prior question to receive any points. That is, the fill-in-the-blank question will get a 0 if work is not shown by pasting it into the following question.
2. I do not need to manually assign a score to the essay question. This is really annoying. If, say, I had a 20-question test, then in this format, it becomes 40 questions—20 fill-in-the-blank and 20 0-point essay questions. Because this is a new quiz, for the grade to appear on the roster, every question must have a grade entered. I therefore have to go through all students' quizzes and enter a 0 by every essay question. I think this could be resolved by new quizzes not requiring any grade entry in 0-point questions. That is, 0-point questions with no entry are just assumed to be 0/0 points. It's silly to force me to enter 0s in such questions.

James

@arencambre,

Quiz questions are independent of each other. There is no way to tell Canvas that fill-in-the-blank #1 goes with essay #2 and that fill-in-the-blank #19 goes with essay #20.

You can group if you use a Stimulus question. When you do this, the fill-in-the-blank and essay question will be visually grouped together but are still separate questions and independent of each other. Part (b) of a stimulus question has no relation to part (a). They each have their own point value but you are unable to tie them together. Stimulus questions had a lot of undeveloped potential. We math teachers wanted the ability to use a random number generator in the stimulus part and then have the sub-parts be able to do calculations on that. This would have allowed us to, for example, ask for both roots of a quadratic equation that was randomly developed in a stimulus prompt.

Since the stimulus parts are separate with their own scores, those essay questions still need graded. That means that the exam isn't graded until you have put in zeros for those 20 essay questions. In fairness to Canvas, it should not default a completed essay question to 0 points, even if the point values are 0. Many people would use that as a potential for extra credit, rather than as a place to show work. Even putting in a 0 automatically has a potential issue. It would mark the exam as graded and the student could see their results, but it wasn't fully graded.

I wrote a script for Classic Quizzes called QuizWiz that would go through and automatically assign 0 points to any unanswered essay and (I think) full points to any answered essay question. Someone told me last month that it doesn't work anymore. I have not tried to do anything similar with New Quizzes. A script to do that for New Quizzes could probably be written, but I've always avoided New Quizzes because it seemed a moving target and it didn't do what I needed as a math teacher.

One potential approach is to have have 20 fill-in-the-blank questions and one file upload question for a total of 21, instead of 40, questions. The students would create a document that (1) clearly identified which problem they were answering and (2) provided the SQL used to answer that question. It would be extra work to download that file, but then you could grade the work just once rather than 20 times. It would be impossible to show where the partial credit was going if you did this since one question was for all the work. What you would have to do instead is add the partial credit to the fill-in-the-blank questions. Then, when the student looked at the questions, they would see that they missed the question but still got points and they would know it was for their work.

That script that I wrote for Classic Quizzes also graded any file upload questions, giving full points. In your case, that would be 0 points. Unfortunately, that doesn't directly help you with New Quizzes, but it gives an idea of what could be done.

Part of what you want could be automated, but it's not built into Canvas. It's so specific that it would need to be a custom script and that means that it will not make it into the Canvas core product. But if you knew that you had a pattern of fill-in-the-blank followed by essay, someone could probably (I say probably only because I haven't done a lot of work with New Quizzes but I have done a lot of work with other things) write a script that would look for that pattern. If the essay is blank, then it resets the score to 0 for the preceding fill-in-the-blank question. Then it assigns a 0 to each essay, which would mark it as graded.

The issue still comes up of when to run this script. Is it something that is automatically ran on a scheduled task so you don't have to do anything or is it something that you want to do when you grade the quizzes? Running it automatically gets grades to the students quicker, but then you have to deal with the "I haven't looked at your work yet, so your grade may change" questions. Running it while grading the quiz probably makes the most sense, but incorporating things into SpeedGrader is harder than other places. My original script for Classic Quizzes ran within SpeedGrader, but the enhancements Canvas has made recently to SpeedGrader and Rubrics has broken a lot of my scripts.