New Quizzes Partial Credit

[mmatuszewski]

How do we give partial credit on multiple answers without a penalty for correct answers? I thought the old quizzes gave points if they picked one of the correct answers but the new quizzes did not.

Right now I have to go in a give points for every student who earned "partial credit" manually. 

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @mmatuszewski 

The option for partial credit in Multiple Answer questions is "partial credit with penalty"

You can choose to award partial credit with penalty or require an exact match for Multiple Answer questions. The partial credit with penalty option awards points for each correct answer selected and deducts points for each incorrect answer selected. Exact match awards full credit only if all correct answers are selected and no incorrect answers are selected.

(per https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-create-a-Multiple-Answer-question-in-Ne... ).

So, in your screenshot, the student got partial credit for choosing "-2", but was penalized for also picking the incorrect answer "-1".  That prevents students from getting full credit for just selecting every answer.

There isn't a "partial credit without penalty" option.

[mmatuszewski]

My next question is how are partial credit and exact match different? If it penalizes them for partial credit and gives them no points isn't that the same as not having the exact match with no points given also?

In the old quizzes if they got one of the two correct answers they received half credit. It does not make sense that it does not give them the correct amount of points. Maybe they can add that option? 

[mzimmerman]

@mmatuszewski 

In "exact match", no points would be given if the student checked one incorrect answer, or failed to check one correct answer.  

In "partial credit with penalty", students are penalized (that is, they get negative points) when they check incorrect answers.   When they fail to check a correct answer, they will not receive credit for that part of the answer, but they will not be penalized.

Remember, students do not know how many of the answers might be correct unless you specifically tell them in the question.  In your example, if the student had checked only "2" and had not checked "-1", they would have gotten half credit for the question.

[KipHaggerty]

Other LMS's also offer a partial credit option of equal weighting (or some other equivalent name) where the student would get an equal amount (say 1 out of 4 points) for correctly selecting an item that is correct (or True) and for not selecting an item that is incorrect (or false). Under that partial credit scheme, the answers given in the original post above would have 2 correct and 2 incorrect answers. He would have gotten 1 selected correctly and one unselected correctly resulting in a score of 2/4. This drove me nuts when I used Canvas at UCLA Extension and I worked around this weird scoring quirk by using Matching with 2 choices (Correct/Incorrect) to get the proper scoring. I used D2L Bright Space at CSULB for many years. It offered the equally weighted partial credit in addition to no partial credit and R-W that we have in Canvas for it's equivalent of the multiple answers question type. My only complaint was that equally weighted partial credit was not the default ...

Sadly, I have a bunch of image processing questions that result in binary 2D arrays as answers that I was able to use Multiple Answers to check where selected meant 1 and unselected meant 0. That obviously just flat out doesn't work using the Canvas R-W partial credit. Matching would work, but is definitely more cumbersome.

Given the lengthy time for which Canvas has not joined the other products in offering an equally likely partial credit option, perhaps the solution is to propose a new question type to offer similar functionality to multiple answers, but with equally weighted partial credit. Maybe "Multiple Selections," Multiple Checkboxes," or "Multiple T/F."

[occnmastroianni]

I concur with @KipHaggerty that adding this other grading option to new quizzes for multiple-answer question types would be nice. This provides more flexibility for instructors to incentivize their students. Let's hope Canvas can catch up with the other LMSs that offer this.