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Essay question

An Essay question allows you to ask participants open ended questions that you want them to answer in an essay-style response. 

Adding the question wording 

To create or edit the wording for your question, click where it says Click here to change the question wording and enter the question wording. You can use the text formatting toolbar to present the question wording in any way you wish. Refer to Using the text formatting toolbar for more information on how to do this. 

Don't forget to Click Save to save all changes and continue editing the question. A message appears confirming the question has been saved. 

    If changes have been made to a question, a revision comment must be entered first before exiting the question editor. 

    Click Exit to leave the question editor. If any changes have been made to the question, a message appears warning that these changes will not be saved. 

    Defining scoring 

    The total score for an Essay question can be defined in the Max score field by entering the desired maximum score. By default, when a participant submits an Essay question in an assessment, the question remains unscored until an administrator or marker manually confirms the overall score based on the rubrics assigned to the question. 

    Adding feedback 

    You can choose to present feedback to participants. The feedback maybe something in general, such as "Your answers will be marked and you will be informed of your final score," or maybe you would like to provide some details about what they should have included in their response. 

    To present feedback to an Essay question, enter feedback text in the This question has not yet been scored field. 

    Adding a comment box 

    Adding a comment box to a question enables participants to provide a response to the question. This is particularly useful when creating surveys. 

    To add a comment box to a question, click Add comment box. The comment box will be added to the bottom of the question. 

    Once a comment box has been added, you can edit the text used to introduce the comment box by entering text in the Add your comment field. You can also resize the comment box by click-and-dragging it to the desired size. 

    Editing question properties 

    Authors can view and define specific properties about questions, such as the question description and the question status. These details can be used by other authors to help review the question or identify where in the workflow process it is. 

    To edit a question's properties, click Edit question properties. The "Question properties" dialog opens. 

    For details about the available properties, please refer to Assigning question properties.

    Adding a note 

    All of the users who have permissions to edit a question can add notes to it. Notes will not be shown to participants. To add a note to the question: 

    • Click Notes. 
    • Enter a note in the Note field. 
    • Click Post to post the note. It will appear below any existing notes. All users who have permissions to view and edit the question will be able to see the note. 
    • Clicking Clear will remove all of the text in the Note field. 

    A note can only be added once a question has been saved for the first time. 

    Assign metatags to the question 

    To assign one or more metatags to the question: 

    • Click Assign metatags. The available metatags appear in a new dialog. 
    • Select the metatags that you want to assign to the question. 
    • Click OK to assign the metatags to the question. 
    • Click Cancel to leave the metatags window without saving the changes. 

    Other considerations 

    When creating an Essay question, two outcomes are created: 

    • the Unscored outcome is used to display a message to the participant and by default always appears, 
    • and the Scored outcome is used to set a maximum score for the essay when it is graded using other software, e.g., Questionmark's Scoring Tool. 

    By default, the Scored outcome will never appear, but it enables external software to ascertain the maximum score. 

      The information on this page relates to Tool and was last updated Month YYYY.

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