essay auto grade moodle

Documentation

Essay (auto-grade) question type.

Please see the updated, more complete, and illustraded version of this documentation at the Moodle 3.7 version for this page .

• Language teaching

Grading Essays

Moodle will auto-grade Multiple Choice, True/False, Multiple Select, and Short Answer questions; but Essay questions will require manual grading. Whether you have 1 essay question in a quiz, or an entire exam comprised of essays, here is how you will grade them.

The grader overlay will take over your screen. There are several key features to the overlay:

• Quiz Essay Questions
• Question Prompt
• Now Grading

Quiz Essay Questions:

The Quiz Essay Questions section lists all essay questions being used within the current quiz. The question "names" are listed down the left side. The category of each question is also displayed on top. In this case, all questions on screen belong to the same category.

The icons in the Quiz Essay Question will help you determine what action should be taken.

In your course, roll your mouse over the icons to display what the icon means, and to list which students received the question. The Quiz Essay Questions portion may also be shrunk by pressing the < button.

Question info:

Now Grading:

In the Now Grading section, you will find:

• the student's name
• the student's response
• a text box for a grade value, and the total of points available
• date the grade was last updated (displays N/A if no grade has been entered)
• a text editor where you can enter feedback for the student
• and a "Save" and "Save & Next" button.

By clicking "Save & Next" the grader will automatically advance to the next student.

Once you have completed all grading, and have saved all responses, you may click the X in the upper right corner of the grader to close. The grades will now be entered in the gradebook.

© Walsh College, All rights reserved

Grading Essay Questions in Moodle Quizzes

• Publication date April 22, 2020

If you choose to add essay questions to your Moodle quiz, you will need to manually grade those items before Moodle can assign a grade to students’ quiz attempts. This guide will show you how to access students’ essay answers for grading.

From your course page, locate and open your quiz.

When the quiz page opens, locate the gear shaped icon for the Quiz Administration options .

When the Quiz Administration menu drops down, click the Results tab.

On the Results tab, click Manual Grading .

On the next screen, you will see a listing by question indicating how many student responses require grading (1), how many attempts you have already graded (2), and how many attempts there are total (3).

• You can access ungraded answers using the links in either the To Grade (1) or Total Answer columns (3)
•  If you need to go back to a previously graded response to change your entry, you can do so by clicking the links in either the Already Graded (2) or Total Answers column (3).

After selecting one of the 3 grading options, you will be taken to a page listing student responses. Enter the number of points earned for each response ( important: if a student earns no points on an attempt, you must enter 0 to allow grade computation ) and any desired comments .

Be sure to click save to commit your entries before navigating out of the grading screen.

Grade Computation

Once all questions requiring manual grading have been graded and saved for a student, their grade will automatically populate into the Moodle gradebook.

Moodle Resource Center

Trinity College, Hartford CT

Grading an Essay Question in a Moodle Quiz

Most of the quiz question options in Moodle are automatically graded, and the point options are set when the question is graded. However, for essay questions, the instructor will need to manually grade the submitted answers by following these instructions.

After you have navigated to the quiz, click “Results” on the vertical navigation menu and click on the drop-down menu where you will see the word Results with four options beneath it.

You want to click on the last option called Manual Grading. If you click Grades you will see the results of the questions Moodle has already graded, but it will not let you grade an essay or other open response answer. After clicking on Manual grading, you will be taken to a page where the questions Moodle hasn’t automatically graded will appear in a list.

In this sample quiz there was only one essay question so it is only displaying that one question, but if you had multiple essay questions they would each be listed in an individual row. In this example,  two students have taken the quiz and one is already graded. This is why it says there are 2 total, one that needs to be graded, and one already graded. To grade the one remaining question, the instructor would click on the word grade under the column “To grade”. This is highlighted below.

This will take you to a new page that looks as follows:

The two important things here are the Comment box and the Mark. In the Comment box you can provide feedback to your students about their response and you can even upload a file here, such as an answer key or rubric. In the Mark box you will give the amount of points for the question score. It is possible to enter fractions for a score, such as 0.8 out of 1. You must enter a mark but you do not have to enter comments to finalize the score.

After you are finished grading one student’s question, click  the “Save and go to next page” button at the bottom of the page. This will take you to the next student’s answer until you have completed all the grading. In order for a quiz to show a total score in the Moodle Gradebook for your students, all the essay or open response questions must be manually graded.

Navigation Menu

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests..., provide feedback.

We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously.

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly.

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation .

• Notifications

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement . We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Set target min and max item count #49

samuel-rosa commented Jun 23, 2021

gbateson commented Jun 24, 2021

• 👍 1 reaction

Sorry, something went wrong.

samuel-rosa commented Jun 24, 2021

Gbateson commented jun 25, 2021 via email, samuel-rosa commented jun 25, 2021.

germanvaleroelizondo commented Jun 25, 2021

Gbateson commented jun 28, 2021 • edited, samuel-rosa commented jul 12, 2021, gbateson commented jul 12, 2021 • edited, samuel-rosa commented jul 14, 2021, gbateson commented jul 14, 2021, gbateson commented jul 18, 2021.

• ❤️ 1 reaction

No branches or pull requests

• LEaD events
• IT Self Service Portal

Create Quiz guide

• Get started - Quiz
• Create a Quiz activity
• Manage categories and questions in categories
• Add random questions to Quiz
• Create maths and science questions with WIRIS
• Essay (auto-grade) question
• Review Essay (auto grade responses)

Review attempt

Override mark.

• All-or-Nothing Multiple Choice question
• Edit quiz layout
• Update Quiz activity
• Provide extra time or additional attempts
• Recommendations to improve Moodle performance for a concurrent Quiz
• Grade Essay questions & override marks
• Release Quiz grades
• Moodle Quiz FAQ
• Related guidance
• Once students have completed the Quiz, you can review the attempt.
• Select the link to the Quiz and select Results in the contextual navigation menu which will display with the number of attempts submitted.
• Review submissions one student at a time, one question at a time, by selecting the  Review attempt  link under the student's name.

The Review attempt will show the auto-grading items which were selected for the question. In this example, Text statistics for Words , Unique words , Long words , and Lexical density are displayed.

The Feedback includes the Grade for this question , the number of Words  from the expected total, whether Target phrases  are present, the General feedback and Combined feedback for correct responses.

A link to  Make commen t or override mark  can be found under the General feedback . A screen to manually grade the question will display in a pop-up.

Type in comments and change the mark on the manual grading (pop-up) screen.

• Make sure that you select the  Save  button at the bottom of the page when you have finished. Verify that your overridden marks have remained as you set them.
• Inform your students about their changed grades and the feedback comments once all quiz attempts have been regraded. 
• Make any necessary changes to your questions and to your glossary of common errors in preparation for subsequent exams.

• << Previous: Essay (auto-grade) question
• Next: All-or-Nothing Multiple Choice question >>
• Last Updated: Apr 19, 2024 1:28 PM
• URL: https://city-uk-ett.libguides.com/staff/moodle/quiz

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

What’s a Teenage Summer For?

Why some young high schoolers are forgoing that last bittersweet summer at camp..

When I think back to the seven summers I spent at sleepaway camp in Maine, I have mostly sense memories: the sound of screen doors slamming, joyous singing in the dining hall, the scent of pine needles on the path to the (always too cold) lake. Those summers feel dreamy and expansive, full of togetherness and growth.

For kids who go to overnight camp for several weeks or more, it’s a multi-summer experience that typically culminates in a final teenage summer or two—often, the summer after ninth grade or 10 th grade—full of special privileges, capstone projects, and sought-after leadership roles. To skip that summer, for Camp People, is to miss the cherry on top, the End of the Era, the coda to the camp experience.

But more and more families today, with college on the brain earlier than ever, are looking at those early teenage summers and reevaluating. The singing, the swimming, the sitting around the campfire may not be enough. “They are thinking [about] ‘how that looks’ on some future college application down the road,” says Corey Dockswell, the director of Camp Wicosuta , a sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, who has been noticing families reconsidering their young teenage kids’ final summers for a number of years.

“Parents will reach out to me and ask about the experience that kids have in the last year at camp—really worried about if it’s ‘a rich enough experience.’ While I don’t think it’s a judgment on camp, I think it’s coming from a place of pressure that’s building earlier and earlier,” Dockswell says. “Pressure from all sides—what parents are hearing, what kids are hearing.”

Another factor, says J.D. Lichtman, the director of Camp Tapawingo , a sleepaway camp in Maine, seems to also be a bit of “pent-up travel bug that is part of the long tail of the pandemic.” (Tapawingo is where I went for many summers as a kid, and where I send my own daughters, who are 10 and 14, so naturally J.D. was one of the first people I called to ask about this issue—especially in light of the conversations I’ve overheard among some of my teenager’s friends lately.)

Lichtman sees kids and families wanting to take more trips—family trips as well as solo enrichment ventures for the kids—which can cut into camp sessions, which may also require a significant time commitment. Social media plays into this, says Lichtman. “Kids see peers posting all these amazing photos from here and there—and then those campers tell me, ‘I saw my friend do this or this thing,’ and that makes them reconsider camp,” Lichtman says.

Chloe (some names have been changed), an 8 th grader in New York City who has been attending camp for four weeks every summer since she was 9, says she probably won’t go back after ninth grade: “There are so many other things I should be doing by now, like so many places to travel instead of just being in one place. I want to do a program in Europe next summer.” That “should” is key: For Chloe, it means that her burgeoning ambitions for the future align better, given what she sees in her social context, with something like traveling abroad.

Skipping the final year of camp was the best decision for writer and college admissions consultant Samantha Shanley’s teenagers, who started attending a YMCA camp in New Hampshire in 2015. The time commitment (six weeks) just didn’t work anymore for her son—who chose to do an intense, monthlong NOLS wilderness program that summer—and the generalized program they offered wasn’t challenging enough anymore for his increasingly specific interests in backpacking and survival skills.

Carrie, a mother in Maryland who sent both of her kids to sleepaway camp, considers herself a true Camp Person. “Our kids are under so much pressure all the time and so, for me, giving camp is a gift. It’s a time warp where there are no devices, and they are completely in a bubble—that is such a gift.”

Nevertheless, instead of spending the summer after 10 th grade as a counselor-in-training at his beloved camp, this summer her son will be taking classes at a university and doing a brief internship—activities designed to help his college résumé. The motivation for the switch is coming from her kid, says Carrie; he feels that “it’s time for him to do something different and build up a certain narrative on his college app.”

A lot of this handwringing is moot, says Sara Harberson, a college adviser based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “Camp is not a ‘reportable activity,’ but neither are any pay-to-play programs and trips overseas kids may take, or ‘early college’ programs either,” she says. The privilege these programs require is not something you want to highlight in the current admissions climate, she notes, where spotlighting an applicant’s life advantages is not desirable. While they may be entirely fun and educational in their own right—and yes, could lead to amazing experiences that could help a kid hone their interests or “find themselves”—doing these types of activities with an eye to your college app is not advisable, agrees Alexis White (aka Alexis College Expert), a college admissions adviser based in Southern California.

What you do in the summer after ninth grade rarely gets reported on your college application, says Harberson. Some of this is purely pragmatic, she notes, since the Common Application only has room for 10 activities—including school, athletics, music, and community service—and the chance you will even have room to include what you were doing after ninth or 10 th grade is slim.

For parents who ask her, “I always say that the summer after ninth is a ‘free summer,’ and even the summer after 10 th is not a big deal—it’s really that summer between junior and senior year that you might want to dig into something that interests you in a real and significant way, with a volunteer opportunity or a job,” says Harberson.

Still, if an older high school student wants to spend summer at sleepaway camp and that is enriching to them—especially if it’s in a counselor-in-training role, which offers leadership training—they absolutely should, because you cannot pick every activity with an eye to pleasing a college, says White. “You have to please yourself and feel refreshed and ready to start the new school year. So many of these kids really need a break,” says Harberson.

What is more problematic, however, is this kind of early “summer optimization” overall, says Ruby, a consultant and parent in Portland with a son who will probably start sleepaway camp in a few years. Ruby “lived ten for two” when she was a kid, and now yearns for the freedom of those days. (Despite the fact that most camps no longer run for eight full weeks, this catchphrase, about how much some kids love camp and count down to it all year, has stuck around in some circles.) “Why does everything have to have real-world payoff? Why does everything have to advance you?” says Ruby. “Can’t something just be diddling around because it’s fun? The panic about college choice has made people sort of get hysterical that their kid is going to get left out; if the kid wants to be at camp and dick around with his friends at the lake, go do that! How many more years are you going to not have this much fun? As adults, we spend so much time trying to recapture that lightness and joy that we have at camp.”

Another way to think of it, says Dockswell, is long game versus short game. “To me, the short game is college—and by that, I mean focusing on your summer activities in terms of how they will help your college prospects. The long game, though, is raising a child to be a citizen of the world who is steeped in good values, has learned how to navigate conflict, work as a team, and have resilience.”

To camp fans, that is exactly what happens around the campfire. Free of digital distractions for the first time in a year, the kids fight and make up. They create and collaborate. They forge new friendships and learn how to live with someone who drives them crazy. (College roommate prep!)

There is a pure sense of childhood at camp that allows them to be a kid for a bit longer—and this dichotomy of fun versus future can be confusing for some parents. “The résumé building feels quantitative— I did this program, I went here, here, and here —whereas camp is sort of qualitative,” says Dockswell. But she insists that the skills they are learning at camp at age 13, 14, and 15 are head and shoulders above those from other programs. “If your kid has an internship at 15 in a psych lab, other than being able to say that—are they really developmentally mature enough to absorb what they are doing? They are developmentally ready to learn to work as a team, to handle conflict—the stuff of camp. I can’t take your kids to Spain, but if you want a kid who is resilient and independent and cooperative—I can do that.”

The last year of camp is a true culminating experience, full of key role-modeling for the younger campers, as well as real responsibilities and privileges. “It’s not nothing. It’s not just one more year, it’s the last piece of a puzzle. It’s the end of an experience,” says Dockswell.

There is no endless summer, this much we know. And part of the beauty of summer—no matter how old you are—is how fleeting it truly is. Whatever the boys and girls of summer choose to do, I think as parents we hope it’s full of memories and lessons that last long past college apps.

One central part of Camp Tapawingo lore is that the camp’s name means “Place of Joy.” For me, and now my kids, having that place— even if just in memories—is everything.