All exercise types are graded automatically in a test or exam, often with full points for a fully correct answer field and no points for an answer field that is not fully correct. The default automatic grading per exercise type is explained in the authoring manual.
Sometimes it can be useful to add extra automatic partial grading to your exercise, for example, to automatically award 75% for an answer field that is correct but not yet fully simplified. To implement extra automatic partial grading, we need positive or negative feedback (see this article on how to create and edit feedback). This means that implementing extra automatic partial grading is only possible in exercise types that have positive or negative feedback.
Examples of exercise types with positive and negative feedback: open, open free, strategy, text, essay and GeoGebra.
Examples of exercise types that only have negative feedback: multiple choice (random), radio button (random) and dropdown.
Examples of exercises where extra automatic grading is not possible: drag n drop, group order and rank order.
To implement extra automatic partial grading, we first need to make a (positive or negative) feedback rule that is hit when the student gives an answer that should receive this partial grading. For example, consider this open type exercise:
We could make a feedback rule that checks if the student gave a fully simplified answer, for example this one:
If we want to give the student automatic partial grading when this feedback rule is hit, we need to check the box “Test usage” and fill in a number between 0 and 100. This is the percentage of points the student will get for the answer field if this feedback rule is hit. For the example above, we get:
We give the student 75% of the points on the Answer field 1 if this feedback rule is hit.
Note that we need to consider priority when using feedback rules for automatic partial grading. If multiple feedback rules apply to the student’s answer at the same time, the "Test usage" percentage is taken from the feedback rule with the highest Priority, where 0 is the highest and 99 is the lowest priority. If the "Test usage" box is not checked, the "Test usage" percentage for that feedback rule is 0%.
To test the automatic grading of an exercise (either the default automatic grading or the extra partial automatic grading), we can preview the exercise in "Test mode". To view test mode, go to the edit exercise page. In the left menu you will see an orange button that says “Test mode”.
In "Test mode", we can test out the exercise and see what automatic grading the student would receive for every answer. Example: