Manually grading quiz questions

This article describes how instructors can manually grade individual questions in a Brightspace Quiz. There are several reasons to do this, including assessing written responses to essay-type questions and to maintain consistency within the grading of a given question.

Manually Grading Quiz Questions

In the Brightspace video on the right, you will learn the steps of manually grading quiz questions and how to activate the blind-marking mode to assure consistency in your grading process.

Multiple choice, true/false, and other click-to-answer questions

Question types that require the student to make a point-and-click selection (like multiple choice or matching) can be manually graded or automatically graded by Brightspace.

Manual grading of these types of questions requires examining each of the answers for correctness and awarding the points. Automatic grading requires no work on the teacher's part except for setting up the quiz to grade on its own.

Fill-in-the-blank questions

Brightspace has the ability to automatically grade fill-in-the-blank questions, but setting the questions up in Brightspace can be challenging. When authoring the question, it is up to the teacher to include the correct answer(s) in the question definition. For example, let's look at the question "The name of our country is the __________." As the teacher, I might be looking for "United States of America" but my students might enter "USA," "U.S.A.," or "U.S. of A. Guessing all the possible variations on the correct answer is quite a challenge and it is for this reason that some teachers manually grade these types of questions.

Assessing written-response questions

Written response questions, like essay and short-answer questions, must be assessed manually, even if the quiz is set up to automatically grade itself. The teacher must read each response and assess each for its individual merit.

Doing the manual assessment

Manually assessing student quiz answers is accomplished by following these steps:

Click on Assessments in the navbar and select Quizzes from the dropdown menu.
Click the arrow after the quiz name and select Grade.
Click the Questions tab.
At this point, select Blind marking if you wish to remove student identifiers during the grading process.
Click on the name of the question you wish to assess.
Add feedback to the first question and move to the next question by using the arrows directly below the Grade Question heading at the top of the page.
Click Save.

Manually grading quiz questions

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