Effectively skip essay questions for a self-assessment

[RobertMitchell]

I have a faculty member who has created self-assessments via New Quizzes in Canvas.  She would like to award points based on whether students completed the self-assessment and on time.

• 20 points if the student completed the quiz and before the deadline date
• 10 points for completing the quiz but up to one week after the deadline
• 0 points for each incomplete quiz or if submitted more than one week past the deadline

There is a self-reporting multiple choice question that yields 20, 10 or 0 points based on their answer.

All other questions yield 0 points and are meant only for the students to look at once they submit so they can learn from their mistakes.

This is an unorthodox method of giving students self-assessment exams that works well EXCEPT for one issue:  certain questions on the exam contain essay questions that are also assigned zero points.  The faculty member would like students to be able to take a look at their submissions immediately and also have access to the key (including the key for essay questions).  At present, she needs to manually grade each of the exams and manually input a '0' for the essay questions before releasing the exam.

I suggested removing all essay questions and/or reserving those questions as a separate quiz since students won't be able to glean any answers until she reads the essay questions and responds to them anyway.  Her response is that she treats these self-assessments as case studies and wants to get the bulk of the exam back to the students right away and address essay questions up to a day later.

Her basic question is this:
Is there a way to globally assign a '0' for all essay questions rather than manually inputting a '0' for each and every student via SpeedGrader?

An odd request, I admit, but one I said I'd follow up with.  I can't come up with a solution other than what I had previously suggested.

[James · Accepted solution]

@RobertMitchell 

To answer her question, no.

I wrote a script called QuizWiz that works with Classic Quizzes -- not New Quizzes -- that will go through and automatically assign a 0 to all unanswered essay questions. It still ran through SpeedGrader, but the logic of it could be used to run through as a scheduled task from a server. I haven't tested this with New Quizzes to know if this is possible, but with Classic Quizzes, I could write code that would download all quizzes that had been submitted since a particular date and time and grade those. I would store the new date and time each time it runs so it's only looking for recent changes and not taking long to execute. Then I would run that script several times an hour (I usually limit it to three times per hour).

That's not immediately, the script isn't written, and I don't know if it could be with New Quizzes, so I'll move on.

I'm not clear what she's meaning with case studies. Your suggestion sounds reasonable to me. Since I am not sure how she means that, I cannot provide suggestions for that.

I haven't tested this next idea. I try to avoid New Quizzes, but at it's core, it's an assignment, so this should work with Canvas -- it's just a question of whether she'll let it work for her.

One thing that might work is to use modules and module requirements. You could make the self-assessment be the first module item and set a requirement to "Must submit". Then a second module item would be a page or file with any feedback that she wanted to provide, including the answer keys. Set that page to Must View. Require that the module items be done in sequential order. The answer keys would open up as soon as they submit the self-assessment, but the self-assessment wouldn't have to be graded right away.