Answered By: Kevin Pischke Last Updated: Jun 25, 2015 Views: 15
This is a common question for when a professor has a quiz/test where, for example, ten essay questions are given to the students, but they only have to answer five. This quiz/test needs to be configured so students aren't penalized for not answering questions.
To do this, you must know the total of the marks in the quiz, and the highest mark you expect to give. Using the aforementioned example, if each of the questions has a mark value of 1, then the total marks of the quiz is 10. Since you are asking students to answer five questions, the expected mark is 5.
Therefore, your students will receive a maximum score of 50%. To adjust this, go to your course gradebook, then to Categories and Items. Select the edit icon next to the quiz, and then look for the multiplicator field. The multiplicator field will multiply students' final scores by the value placed into it. To find the proper multiplicator, divide the total marks by the expected mark. In our example, the correct multiplicator is 2. A student who answered five questions correctly would then receive a score of 100%, rather than 50, while a student who answered three of the five correctly would receive a 60% instead of 30%.
This method will only work on a quiz in which all the questions have equal weights (points). If your questions are weighted differently from one another, the multiplicator will produce inaccurate results.