From version 3.9.5 there is an important improvement to how open-end questions work in Watu PRO. We have added a “Matching mode” which lets you define how the user answer is matched to the possible answers you provide.

When answers are provided:

Let’s use the following question as an example: “Which are the top 3 countries by population in the world?”. (The correct answers are China, India, and USA).

When using Loose match the user’s answer will collect points if it contains some of your answers, or if it is contained in some of them. So for example if you give 3 possible answers: China, India, USA, and assing 1 point to each of them, here is how the following free texts enter by the user will be rated:

– Typing “India, China, USA” will bring 3 points because all the 3 answers you have given are contained in the user answer
– Typing “India and China” brings 2 points
– Typing “China, Nigeria, USA” brings 2 points and so on

The match type “User answer text contains your answer” is a sub-case of Loose match. If we get the above examples, it will earn the same number of points. However if you select “Your answer text contains the whole user answer” all the 3 responses will get 0 points. Such a selection would be more useful if you ask “Tell me one of the top 3 countries by population” and the user has to enter only one country name.

Using “Exact match” works like before. In this case you probably have to reword your question to “Which are the three top countries by population – type them one after the other, separated with commas”, and then enter “China, India, USA” as correct answer.

The correct or incorrect marking of the question in this case will depend on the points user collected and your selection under “Answering this question will be considered CORRECT when:”.

When no answers are provided:

Often you will be creating open-end questions that have no possible answers – like essays where you just want the user to enter some text. In this case (unless the question is survey question) we have to still mark it as correct or incorrect although the user does not earn any points.

The logic is simple: these questions will be labeled as “correct” when user types anything, and “incorrect” when they type nothing.

To avoid displaying correct or incorrect checkmark on such questions simply check the “This is a survey question” checkbox.

Important note on maximum points

If you are basing some of your calculations on maximum possible points in questions, it’s important to understand how this works with open-ended questions.

If you have five possible correct answers, each of them giving 3 points, this means that the maximum points on this question will be 15 and not 3. This is because in theory the user could write a text that includes all the correct answers.

In case this behavior is unwanted, use the following setting to cap the maximum points to 3 (or any other number):

Important: you can not use this setting to assume a higher number of maximum points on this question. You may want to manually edit the answers of each student after completing the quiz and manually assign points. This is fine but the “maximum points” calculation will never exceed the points that can be naturally collected by giving correct answers. Examples:

• 5 possible correct answers, each of them giving 3 points. Nothing entered in the “maximum points” box above. The maximum points of this question will be 15.
• 5 possible correct answers, each of them giving 3 points. “3” entered in the in the “maximum points” box above. The maximum points of this question will be 3.
• 5 possible correct answers, each of them giving 3 points. “25” entered in the in the “maximum points” box above. The maximum points of this question will be 15.
• No correct answers entered by admin (which is often the case with essay questions). “10” entered in the in the “maximum points” box above. The maximum points of this question will be 0 and not 10.

So what to do if you don’t have any predefined correct answers and will be manually assigning points to this question and want to use the maximum points calculations? Just enter one “fake” correct answer that no one would type (a meaningless string) and give it the points that you want to be the maximum possible points on this question.