Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
Inflexibility
Many of us are using the quiz function in Canvas, both for allowing students to practice and for exams. Canvas uses a rather inflexible way of automatically grading the answers in most cases – either the answers are completely correct or all wrong! This does not always match your intentions as a teacher – you may not want a student getting two out of four correct options in a matching question to get 0 points, but rather 50% of the max.
Manually grading - give your students the points they deserve
Unfortunately, there is no way to change how Canvas corrects your questions, but there are ways to manually give the students the points they deserve. When going through the quiz response in the Speedgrader there are two main ways to adjust the scores of students. Either you go to the bottom of the page, where you find “Adjust scores” where you can add or subtract point from the total score on the quiz. A downside with this option is that the student will not know on what question they got a different score than suggested by the automatic correction. The other option is to manually change the score for each of the questions in the quiz. In this case the student will better understand where the points came from. A word of warning here; Once you have altered the score do not press “Reevaluate”, since Canvas then automatically corrects the quiz again. Regardless of method you have the option to add a comment to the questions where your assessment deviated from the automatic correction, to help the students understand how you motivated the extra points.
Test new Quizzes
If you like using quizzes we recommend that you try out the novel Quiz tool in Canvas – new Quizzes, which gives you more options regarding types of questions. Go to Settings, Feature options and turn on New quizzes if you like to give it a try!
If you want to learn more about New quizzes, have a look at the LU's New quizzes guide, or at the New quizzes guide from Instructure (opens in new window).
By: Christoffer Johansson, Biology