Topic outline

  • Grading criteria for adaptive marking

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    • Set Global variables, Grading variables and Grading criteria for adaptive marking

      • You can set up the grading criteria for composite answers so that later answers can be marked as correct even if based on initial incorrect answers, provided the correct process of calculation has been followed.
      • Set up adaptive marking in the global variables, grading variables and the grading criterion settings
        • Global variables. Enter any formulas that Moodle should use to manipulate the random variables.  
        • For example:

                                       SolA = A+B;

                                     SolB = SolA+C;

                                      SolC = SolB+D

        • Grading variables. Now add the Boolian expressions to the Grading variables.  Set new variables for the students’ possible answers, based on the global variables.

      Example: Suppose we have a question with three answers. You can see the grading variables below:

      answer1= _0==SolA;

      answer2= _1==SolB;

      answer3= _2==SolC;

      answer4= _3==SolD;

      answer5= _1/(_0+C) == 1;

      answer6= _2/(_1+D) == 1

      The first four lines tell Moodle to assign a value of 1 mark (true) or 0 marks (false) to the variable a1, depending on whether the students’ answer (_0) is the same as the global variable expected answer (SolA). These values of 1 or 0 are then used in the Grading criterion.

      The final two lines tell Moodle to assign a value of 1 or 0 to the variable a4 depending on whether the students’ answer is correct in relation to their answer to part 1 of the question.

        • Grading criteria. Now set up the string in the grading criteria to define how the Boolian expressions are used:

      max((answer1*0.25+answer2*0.25+answer3*0.25+answer4*0.25),(0.2*answer4+0.2*answer5))

      The first string states that if the student enters the expected answers they will get a quarter of the marks for each correct answer.  The second string gives students 0.2 marks if their first answer is incorrect, but they have used it correctly to calculate the answers for the second and third parts of the question. 


      Things to watch out for:

      1. Using adaptive marking on an answer which is using more than one previous answer can lead to problems, especially if the student got one previous answer right but the other wrong. Try to break up the question as much as possible, so that answers are only dependant on one previous answer.
      2. We recommend not using relative error and adaptive marking in the same question, as there is only one setting for relative error. If it is applied to the initial answer, it may misapply to subsequent answers.
      3. For complex adaptive marking, it may be easier to keep to 4 questions or 5 questions since 1 can be easily divided by these values and will work better in the grading criteria.
      4. If using adaptive marking where different rounding methods will be assigned different marks, set the answer as the full value, not the rounded value. Moodle will not recognise other rounded values accurately if you do this.

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