Development Guide: Automatically Graded Quizzes

Automatically graded quizzes and exams are vital assessment methods for digital learning. A thoughtfully constructed quiz can enable critical thinking, provide new examples, and allow students to apply their knowledge. These types of questions can take more time to prepare than other question types, but their significance should not be undervalued for the student learning experience.

This guide contains answers to common questions, best practices, and tips and pointers for some of the dos and don’ts to keep in mind when developing automated questions. As always, please contact your Active Learning Project Editor for additional guidance.

Please also refer to our Test Bank Development Guide and Writing Quality Assessment Questions Guide for additional tips on formatting and selecting questions for online learning.

Frequently Asked Questions

What question types are supported for automatically graded quizzing?

Automatically graded question types include multiple-choice, multiple answer, true or false, matching, and fill-in-the-blank quiz questions.

Why choose an automatically graded quiz?

Student practice. A well-constructed auto-graded exam is an excellent option for student review. Unlike short-answers or essay questions, students can be given the option to take these quizzes several times, and they have the opportunity to see their scores, question feedback, and the correct answers at the end.

Easier grading. Automatically graded quiz score results will go directly to the Active Learning instructor grade book with no additional work from the instructor. In Cognella’s hosted system, instructors can use specialized grading tools to make grading quicker and more effective. Instructors can review frequently missed items by students to find topics in need of further review.

  • Keep in mind that adopting textbook instructors will be provided with access to Active Learning as well. With automated quizzing, they will not face any challenges in assessing the results of their students’ quizzes or exams.

Customization. Settings are easier to control with automatic grading. You can choose whether to display a score or correct/incorrect options and provide specific feedback for various answers the student may select.

Activity development. Cognella’s Active Learning Team can use automated quiz questions to develop practice games and activities.

What if my subject works best with short answers and essays?

A remark we occasionally hear from professors is that their course is not focused on memorizations of facts. These kinds of topics often mode well with short-answer or essay questions. We strongly encourage these types of questions for in-class testing or discussion posts, rather than for our digital learning platform.

However, instructors are welcome to include short-answers with the foreknowledge that additional work may be required to manually grade the results. Specialized grading tools are available on our website to save time and effort with manual grading. Please prepare feedback that can be shared with adopters when utilizing short-answer questions.