Creating short answer questions

Short answer (SA) questions require respondents to create one word or brief sentence answers in response to open-ended questions.

Create a short answer question

1. Enter a Title. Enter a Points value. Select a difficulty level in the Difficulty drop-down list.
2. Enter your SA question in the Question Text field.
3. Click Add a File to upload an image to accompany your question. You can enter a description of the image in the Description field.
4. Click Add Blank to create additional answer boxes if your SA question requires users to submit more than one answer. Set the number of Rows and Columns to control the answer box's display size.
5. To delete an answer box, click the corresponding Remove Blank icon.
6. You can click Add Answer if you accept more than one possible solution for each answer. To reduce the number of possible solutions for an answer, click the corresponding Remove Answer icon.

   Note  As a best practice, we recommend that the weight of each possible solution equals 100% if you require only one answer. If your question requires multiple answers, and each answer has several possible solutions, we recommend that the combined weight of each answer's most correct solution be equal to 100%.

7. Enter an Answer and set a weight in the Weight (%) field for each possible solution. You can set different weights if some solutions are more correct than others.
8. Select an Evaluation option:
   • Case Insensitive  Auto-grading searches for a matching character pattern in the answer text with or without letter case correctness.
   • Case Sensitive  Auto-grading searches for a matching character pattern in the answer text that must have letter case correctness.
   • Regular Expression  Auto-grading uses meta-characters to search for one or more matching strings in the answer text's character pattern. What you set as meta-character parameters helps determine letter case sensitivity. See Understanding regular expressions for more information.
9. Click Check Answers to validate answer fields with regular expressions.
10. Provide comments and suggestions in the Question Hint and Question Feedback fields.
11. Click Preview to view your question.
12. Click Save to return to the main page, click Save and Copy to save and create another SA question that retains the copied properties, or click Save and New to continue creating new SA questions.

See also

• Managing questions in the Question Library
• Understanding regular expressions