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© Half-Baked Software, Inc., 1998-2004
based on the number of attempts the student makes before getting a correct answer. You can also include
a Hint button, which will give the student one letter of the answer; using the Hint button incurs a penalty on
the score.
A hybrid qu
es
tion is a combination of a multiple-choice question and a short-answer question. In this type
of question, the student is first presented with a text box and asked to type the answer. However, if the
student fails to get the answer right after a specified number of tries (which you can configure in the
configuration screen), the question changes to a multiple-choice question to make it easier. When you are
creating a hybrid question, you'll see an extra checkbox on the right:
I
n
c
lud
e
in MC an
s
w
e
r
s
. Check this
checkbox for any answer you want to appear as part of the multiple-choice answers in the second phase of
the question. For example, your short-answer question may include four predicted correct answers which
would be acceptable, but you probably only want to include one of them as a multiple-choice option.
Finally, a
multi-
se
l
ec
t qu
es
tion
asks the student to select several of a specific set of items. The idea here
is that the student must select all the correct items, and not select all the wrong items. This type of question
might take the format "Which of the following are nouns?", followed by a list of words. The student must
check all the nouns, but not check any answers which are not nouns, then press a Check button. If the
answer is not completely correct, the student will see a readout of the number of correct choices, and one
piece of feedback; this would be the feedback from the first item in the list which was either selected when
it shouldn't be selected, or not selected when it should be selected.
-o-
JQuiz
c
onfiguration d
e
tail
s
The configuration for JQuiz includes a lot of prompts, because each type of question requires different
onscreen controls, responses and explanations. On the Other page of the Configuration dialog there are
options for shuffling the order of questions when the page loads, and shuffling the order of answers within
each question. You can also choose to have only a limited number of questions (selected randomly) load
each time the page loads. If you combine these options (shuffling of questions and answers, and random
selection of questions) you can create a quiz that will be different each time a student accesses it, making it
more useful for repeated practice.
Also, note that you can choose whether to make answer-checking case sensitive or not. In normal
circumstances, if you are making short-answer quizzes, it would probably make sense to have
case-sensitivity switched off, so that it doesn't matter whether the student enters an answer in upper case
or lower case. However, if your quiz asks for answers in sentences (as for example in the case of a
grammar exercise), then using the correct case where necessary might be part of the exercise. In this
case, case-sensitivity should be turned on.
Finally, both JQuiz and JCloz
e
include the option to add an onscreen keyboard for students to type
non-roman characters into answer boxes.
For more information on the configuration screen and configuration files, see Configuring the output.
-o-
B
e
ginn
e
r and Advan
ce
d mod
es
JQuiz
is quite a complicated application compared with previous versions, and the full interface can be a
little intimidating for new users because of the range of features available. Therefore, on the Options menu,
there is a Mod
e
setting so you can choose between Beginner or Advanced interface features. These are
the features which are hidden in Beginner mode:
Qu
es
tion W
e
ighting
With this option, you can change the relative importance of different questions in the overall score. For
instance, you could set one question to be worth only 10, while another is worth 100 (the range is 0-100); in
this case, the score for the second question would be worth ten times as much a
s
a compon
e
nt of th
e
ov
e
ra
ll
qu
iz
s
cor
e
than the score for the first question.
Another use for question weighting might be to give students one or two "trial questions" at the beginning of
a quiz, in case they're new to online exercises. If you set the question weighting to zero, then the student
can do the question without penalty; there will be no effect on their score.
