Online tests: how to grade them

Populi automatically grades several question types:

• Multiple choice
• Multiple answer
• Put in order
• True/false
• Matching
• Short answer questions for which you have entered automatic-grading options.

If you compose a test entirely of such questions, Populi will grade the whole test for you as soon as the student submits it. If you have any essay questions and/or short answers for which you've not entered any answers, those questions will be ungraded. You'll need to grade ungraded questions manually.

To see how to regrade questions in the Test > Analysis view, jump down here.

How to get to ungraded questions:

Click the alert for ungraded questions on your Populi Home page, My Courses, or the course dashboard. This takes you to the To Be Graded view in Tests:

You can also navigate straight to the Tests > To Be Graded view from within your course. If there are any ungraded questions, you'll see a number indicating such in the navigation view:

On any test, click History. Select one of the student tests by clicking the start time. Ungraded questions will be marked with :

On the test's assignment page, you can find all of a student's test attempts (and ungraded questions) on the student assignment detail view:

How to grade questions

Under each question, you'll see the answers submitted by individual students. After evaluating their answers...

1. To score the answer, type a number of points in the field or click a percentage in the radio buttons to auto-fill the number field.
2. To give extra credit, simply type in more points than the question is worth. You can enter up to twice the point-value of the question.
3. Grades are auto-saved while you work.
4. To leave comments, click Add comment. After entering the comment, click Save comment. Comments are not auto-saved!
   • As you work through student answers on the To be graded view, click Refresh in the right column to hide your graded questions and display any new questions that came through while you were working.
5. When you're done working, just navigate elsewhere. As soon as you've graded all of a student's answers for a particular test, the test assignment is automatically graded and entered in your gradebook.

Test history

The History view for each test lets you review how each student performed on the test and gives you some other important statistics, including duration, IP address, and proctor information.

• Click the student's name to go to his student course summary page.
• As mentioned above, you can click a start time to look at an individual student's answers. If the student started the test after the test's due date (but still within the availability window), you'll see a badge to that effect.
• If you see -- in the grade columns, that test has ungraded questions and so cannot be graded.
• The IP address tells you "where" the student was when he submitted the test. By looking at IP addresses, you might find out that a student retook a test four times from four different computers, or that a group of students all took a test, one after the other, from the same computer.
• Click the proctor's name to see his contact information. appears when the proctor did not enter the check-out code; this could indicate that something about the student's test is not above-board.
• To delete a student's test, click . This automatically recalculates the student's final grade. If you do this on a test for which no retakes are permitted, you'll need to add an availability exception for that student if you want him to take the test again.

Test analysis

After your students have started submitting their tests, the Analysis view aggregates their answers so you can see how they performed as a group. Each question type displays all the answers given by students and the answers' distribution (except for essay questions, which show only distribution of grades). You can also see how many times students took the test and the average duration.

Here are some of the things you might find out:

• The students more or less aced the questions from Chapter 3, but bombed the questions from Chapter 4. Looks like you'll need to review Chapter 4 with them.
• The True/False questions are just too easy. You might consider some more challenging multiple choice or multiple answer questions.
• Almost everyone got the 8th question wrong... because you misspelled a key term you wanted them to define.
• The variation in the short answers reveals that your questions need to be more specific.
• Among many other things...

If you determine that an automatically-graded question has proved too hard or too easy, you can regrade it. Here's how:

1. Click next to the answer you'd like to regrade.
2. Select the percentage for the New Score.
3. Click Save to finish.

After you regrade a question, Populi will recalculate test scores for all affected students.