In an essay exercise type, a student must answer with a piece of text. An example is the following:
The student can add formulas to their text by clicking the “f(x)” button in the text editor menu:
If you cannot see the text editor menu, try clicking away from the answer field and then clicking on the answer field again.
Solution
The essay exercise type can be used with or without a solution. When a solution Definition is provided, the answer of the student will be checked according to the specified evaluation type. All available evaluation types for checking text are displayed below.
When no solution is provided, the student is able to grade their own answer after asking for a solution. In a test, the answer is always graded with 0 points and the teacher should grade the exercise manually to assign points. In an exercise as the example above, we recommend not providing a solution, since text evaluation options are limited.
It is also possible to use text in the variables of a Text type exercise:
For information on how to translate an exercise that has text in the variables, see this article.
Evaluation types
Evaluation of this exercise (in “Solutions”, “Negative feedback” and “Positive feedback”) can be done by any of the text-based evaluation types:
Contains text
Checks whether the user input contains all the texts from the Definition field, not necessarily in the same order. The texts must be separated by a semicolon ';'.Variations of the same text (e.g. contractions) can also be added by placing them between square brackets '[ ]' and separating them by comma ','.
For example, if Definition: [is not,isn't];and;tree then the user input must include the texts 'and', 'tree' and one of the words 'is not' or 'isn't' in order to be considered correct.
Note that the text “a band is not the same as two trees” will also be correct because both 'and' and 'tree' are included (in the words ‘band’ and ‘trees’).Contains word
Same as “Contains text”, but now “a band is not the same as two trees” will not be considered correct, because “band” is not the same word as “and”, and “trees” is not the same word as “tree”.Similar text
Determine a percentage of similarity between the student's answer and the solution Definition, for example, to catch spelling errors. Specify a Precision to set the tolerated percentage deviation between the student’s answer and the Definiton, e.g. Precision = 10 would mean there needs to be a 90% similarity in order to evaluate to ‘true’.
Example:
The similarity between “parabol” and “parabola” is ⅞=87,5%. The Precision is 20%, which means a similarity of 80% would suffice to activate this feedback rule:
Text case insensitive
Checks whether the user input is equal to the text in the Definition field with a case insensitive check.Text case sensitive
Checks whether the user input is equal to the text in the Definition field with a case-sensitive check.Text regex
Checks whether the user input matches the regex pattern entered in the Definition field. For more information on regex patterns, click here.For example, if you want to write a regular expression to match a date format such as dd/mm/yyyy then you would write the following:
^(0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])[\/\-](0?[1-9]|1[012])[\/\-]\d{4}$Note that we need to escape the forward slashes with a backslash.
Any html-tags are stripped from the student's answer, so usage of bold tags like “The answer is <strong>apple</strong>” will become “The answer is apple”.
Any html-tags are stripped from the student's answer, so usage of bold tags like “The answer is <strong>apple</strong>” will become “The answer is apple”.
Default incorrect (only in Negative feedback)
Always reacts to wrong answers and has a predefined priority of 99.