Essay questions are perhaps the easiest of the questions to create. These questions allow you to see what the student knows or feels about the question. One of the drawbacks to using Essay is that they require you to read each response individually and manually score them, something we will talk more about later.
Some people use Assignment to give essay questions. Assignment allows you to create essay questions in a faster, easier, and many say, better way. However, if it does have a place in your quizzes, that place is for when you want to time your students' writing, and this is something that can't be done with Assignment.
When creating Essay questions, it is important to clearly tell the students what you are looking for in the response. How many words you are looking for, that they must follow a specific essay format, and so on. If you are able to clearly spell out these types of things, the Essay format will be a valuable addition to your tests.
We will create a new quiz and title it Essay. Then we need to make sure we are in the Default for Essay and then create a new essay question. We will call it Should the government support more farmers? and use the same for the question text. Choose a position and support it with evidence from class discussions and readings.
Under this entry, we see two feedback fields, General Feedback and Feedback. These are basically the same thing, they will show feedback to the student after we are ready and have graded the essay. The only difference between these two fields is that the General Feedback will always be shown and the Feedback will only be shown once. This action, of course, depends on your Quiz settings in the Review Options.
Once we have entered our feedback, if any, we click on the Save changes button.
Preview the essay question and see if there are any mistakes or if there is anything you want to change.
Here is what the finished product looks like.
That is all there is to making Essay questions in quiz. It is very easy to do. In fact it is so easy, I am not even going to make you create one!
Essays can be a very useful addition to your tests, but are time consuming to mark. You will need to read over each one individually and manually grade it. Until you have gone in and added a grade, the student will have a zero for this question.
Also, when you have multiple essay questions on one page of a quiz, only the first will give the student access to the rich-text editor. Any remaining essay questions on the page will have plain-text areas only.
Depending on your teaching context and subject area, it may be simpler to have students use the Assignment activity or a word processor and print their work for you to look over and score. Not only does this process give you a hard copy of their work, it also allows you to physically write on the paper, which may allow more specific feedback to be given. Grades are automatically transferred into the Gradebook, students have feedback available to them online at any time, and you can allow the students to retake the quiz with their earlier answers available.