These questions are simply matching questions in which the individual questions are drawn at random from the Short Answer questions in the question category, and each student will be presented with a slightly different set of questions. Random Short Answer matching takes the Short Answer question on the left-hand side of the page and takes correct answer from each, and makes it a choice for matching on the right-hand side of the page. These questions are very simple to create and so we will jump right in so you can see what they look like. Do this one with me.
We are going to go back to our Short Answer quiz and inside it we are going to create a new question. We will select Random Short-Answer Matching.
You will notice that the Question Name and Question Text have both been completed for us. If you want to change the name or text, you can. We are going to leave it as it is.
We are not going to leave any General Feedback, so we scroll down to the bottom of the page and we see a new function called Number of Questions to Select with a drop-down menu beside it. This drop-down menu gives us the option to select between two and ten Short Answer questions to be randomly added to the question and made into Matching items. We have already created four items, so we will select four from the drop-down menu and click on Save changes.
If you enter more questions than you actually have, you will see a message above the Number of Questions to Select drop-down menu, telling you that there are not enough questions available and that you will need to: choose a new category to use, add more questions, or reduce the number of questions you want to use.
Now we will preview the question and then add it to our test. Here is what it looks like, as shown in the next screenshot:
These questions can be very useful if you want to create review sections on tests or simply want to drill students frequently over past questions in a quick and easy manner. However, as I am sure you can see in our item shown previously, there are some issues with creating these items.
The first issue is that creating a list of random questions from a wide variety of topic areas makes for an extremely easy quiz. Only the correct response is added to the matching, so if you decide to use these items, try to make sure that all the Random Short Answer items that are being drawn upon are in the same subject area and require the same type of answers (that is, if you have questions with dates as answers, put them all together in one category).
The other issue that is clear is the wildcard. If you intend to use these wildcards, you may want to go back to the Short Answer and create a new category specifically for the Random Short-Answer Matching and change the first correct answer to a specific response. For example, instead of using democrats*republicans as the first correct response, you could enter democrats and republicans. Doing this will ensure there is no hint or obvious difference between different responses.