This article describes the following:

  • Open-Response Question Overview
  • How to Create and Assign an Open-Response Question
  • How Students Receive Points and Feedback on Open-Response Questions
  • Good to Know Tips

These questions may help better align students' assessments in Codon for the instructors who include open-response questions on their in-class summative assessments. With this feature, you can:

  • Grade based on completion points or no points.
    • Please note, we do NOT yet have the ability for instructors to manually grade.
  • Gather survey-style feedback from students about:
    • What they find "Muddy" or interesting in current content
    • How they feel about their progress in the course
    • Other insights where there is no "correct" answer


Create and Assign an Open-Response Question

1. While creating a custom question, choose the "Written and Recorded" category on the left and click "Open Response."


2. Write the question in the text box at the top. You can add images, tables, links, math, and other formatting as desired.


3. Under "More Options," write a "Sample Answer." 

  • This is what students will see and use to self-assess their own answer after submitting. 
  • You can add images, tables, etc. to the sample answer as well. You cannot click "Done" until you've entered something in the sample answer field.




4. Click Save at the top.

5. Add additional questions if creating a multi-part question, or click "done" to return to the assessment.

6. Find the new question in the bank and click the plus button to add it to the assessment.




How Students Receive Points and Feedback on Open-Response Questions


1. Before they can submit their answer, students must (a) type something in the text box and (b) select "muddy" or "clear".



2. After clicking submit, students receive full points for completing any open-response questions. The sample answer appears and students are instructed to compare their response to the sample answer to assess their understanding. A grey checkbox shows up next to the question in the list on the right, to indicate that they completed the question.




3. To try the question again, or simply view the sample answer again, students can answer the question as many times as they like for practice in the Study Path.



Good to know...

  • At the beginning of each assessment, students are reminded of how open-response questions are graded.
  • Multi-part questions that include a mix of open-response and fixed-choice questions are still graded for correctness for the fixed-choice subparts, if the overall grading policy for the assessment is for correctness. In the example below, the student earned 0.5 out of 1 points because they answered the multiple choice subpart incorrectly (0 points) and they attempted the open-response subpart (0.5 points for completion).




Review student responses to open-response questions:

  1. Navigate to the Student Performance page using the menu at the top of the screen.
  2. Click on the column header for the assessment of interest.
  3. Click on the column header for the open-response question of interest.
  4. Students' first response appears in the "Response prior to point recapture or practice in the Study Path" column. We will soon be rolling out improvements to this page to make it more useful for open-response (and fixed-choice!) questions.