Moodle LMS provides one of the best online quiz engine. As an educator, you can use Moodle Quiz to create all different types of online exams with various types of questions. There are many other question types contributed by the community in the Moodle plugins directory. In this post we will see about one such Moodle plugin – Essay (auto-grade).

As an Moodle educator, you might have faced the problem with essay type questions which need manual grading. Most of the other question types are automatically graded but Essay Question type needs the educator’s intervention for grading. It often consumes a lot of time and effort of the teachers as well as the students needs to wait for their results until its graded.

The Essay (Auto-Grade) question type plugin awards a provisional grade as soon as the student submits an essay. The provisional grade is based on the number of words, sentences and target phrases that are present in the essay. For automatic grading the plugin uses the following characteristics:

• the number of words in the response
• the number of characters in the response
• the presence of one or more target phrases in the response
• the presence of one or more common errors in the response

The best thing about this plugin is that at any time, the teacher can override the automatically generated grade by giving a manual grade and feedback as in the standard “Essay” question type. In addition, this question type allows the teacher to specify “grade bands” which can be used to create a non-linear grading scheme.

You can download the latest version of the Essay (Auto-Grade) question type plugin here.

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