how to grade essay questions in moodle

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.

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Documentation

Note: You are currently viewing documentation for Moodle 3.2. Up-to-date documentation for the latest stable version of Moodle is probably available here: Essay question type .

Essay question type

• Managing questions
• Question behaviours
• Simple Calculated
• Drag and drop into text
• Drag and drop markers
• Drag and drop onto image
• Calculated Multichoice
• Description
• Embedded Answers (Cloze)
• Multiple Choice
• Random Short Answer Matching
• Select missing words
• Short-Answer
• Third-party question types
• Questions FAQ

Note : This page is about the essay question type in the Quiz activity. For information about the essay question type in a Lesson activity, see the documentation Building Lesson .

• 1 About the essay question type
• 2.1 Response options
• 2.2 Response template
• 3 Question grading

About the essay question type

The essay question type provides the option of answering by uploading one or more files and/or entering text online. (For longer essays, text or file uploads, you may wish to consider using the Assignment activity rather than this question type.)

Essay questions are created in the same way as other quiz question types. The difference is that essay questions have to be marked manually, and the student will not get a final grade until the teacher has marked their essay.

Creating an essay question

• If you haven't yet made a quiz, access the Question bank from Course administration>Question bank and click the button 'Create a new question', choosing 'Essay'.
• If you have made a quiz, access the Edit quiz screen and from the Add drop down, choose 'Add a new question', choosing 'Essay'.
• Give the question a descriptive name - this allows you to identify it in the Question bank.
• Enter the question in the 'Question text' field. This will be the title of and information about the essay you wish them to write.
• Set the 'default mark' and any 'General Feedback' if required. This is text that appears to the student once you have graded their essay.

Response options

• 'Response format' allows you to choose what is available for the students when typing their essays, for example the regular WYSIWYG editor with or without the option to upload files, or a plain text editor (with no formatting.) No inline text means they cannot type any text. You cannot select this if you don't allow attachments, as the students will have nothing to submit. If you have programming students, they may require plain text with monospaced font for their code.
• 'Require text' allows you to decide whether or not students must add text into the text editor when they do the question. If you only want them to upload a word-processed file as an essay, then you can set this to 'Text input is optional'. (Note that this setting does not force the student to type text into the text editor; they can still leave it blank and continue to another question.)

Response template

It is possible for a teacher to create a template to scaffold the student's answer in order to give them extra support. The template is then reproduced in the text editor when the student starts to answer the question. See Youtube video Essay scaffold with the Moodle quiz It is also possible to include grading information for teachers marking the essay to refer to as they assess the essays:

Question grading

The essay question will not be assigned a grade until it has been reviewed by a teacher and manually graded. Until that happens, the student's grade will be 0.

To grade essays answer in quizzes using Boost ,click on the quiz and then, from the gear menu, click 'Manual grading'. For other themes, click Manual grading' from the Quiz results section of your quiz administration block.

When manually grading an essay question, the grader is able to enter a custom comment in response to the essay and assign a score for the essay.

• Grading essay questions forum discussion