Allow to discard questions at published assessment

As far as I know, Samigo does not currently have a concept of "total score" outside of the point value it gets after adding up points for the questions. Would this feature also require a new method of scoring assessments overall, e.g. instructor sets a total score and Samigo automatically distributes all the points equally among the questions?

No, this feature would not require a new method of scoring assessments. Samigo should distribute the score from the discarded question between the other questions.

If this feature is implemented, I would appreciate it being configured with a sakai property to turn it on or off at system level (and, if possible, at site level as well, in case some specific instructor wants it). Automatic re-distribution of points seems dangerous to me for the reasons I described in my comment above.

It would also create more inconsistency in the UI for random draw vs. regular assessments. I think instructors who use random draw would be frustrated if they can't use this feature, when it exists for other assessments.

I'm always nervous about any change that can impact (and be liable to break!) scoring. I would prioritize fixing the Samigo backend and cleaning up the code over any new grading methods.

You are right. This feature is dangerous because it could break the assessment scoring system. Furthermore this feature would only affect non random draw assessments to the detriment of the random draw assessments.

Taking into account there are a lot of other samigo issues more critical than this feature I'm going to close this Jira as "won't fix". If this feature is required by the Sakai community it could be opened again.

As far as I know, Samigo does not currently have a concept of "total score" outside of the point value it gets after adding up points for the questions.  Would this feature also require a new method of scoring assessments overall, e.g. instructor sets a total score and Samigo automatically distributes all the points equally among the questions?

If this feature is implemented, I would appreciate it being configured with a sakai property to turn it on or off at system level (and, if possible, at site level as well, in case some specific instructor wants it).  Automatic re-distribution of points seems dangerous to me for the reasons I described in my comment above.

It would also create more inconsistency in the UI for random draw vs. regular assessments.  I think instructors who use random draw would be frustrated if they can't use this feature, when it exists for other assessments.

I'm always nervous about any change that can impact (and be liable to break!) scoring.  I would prioritize fixing the Samigo backend and cleaning up the code over any new grading methods.

I believe that some instructors use point so specific to avoid precission issues. E.g. assessment (10 points) with 3 questions which are worth 3,3333... each one. The more decimal places you use the more precission you get in the assessment score to avoid an score of 9,9999... instead of 10.

This new feature should use 7 or 8 decimals places when distributing the points between the questions. Thus if you use more decimal places you should not have issues if Samigo rounds the values after the points distribution.

I'm still really uneasy about any automatic adjustment of points.

I've seen a number of quizzes where instructors make point values strangely specific, e.g. 0.33333333 points for a multiple choice, multiple selection question with right less wrong, so that the correct answer options come out to being worth 0.11111111 points each.  (Don't ask me why they won't just use numbers like 0.5 or 1!)  Samigo's rounding does not always behave as expected, and I would not be surprised if an instructor's points got rounded weirdly when decimals are involved, resulting in a different total point value for a test after throwing out a question.

Hi

My reply is below each question.

I'm very concerned about the proposed automatic re-allocation of points to other questions. Potential issues:

• There's no way for samigo to know to which question it is appropriate to assign the "redistributed" points. You could end up with questions with inappropriate point values, weighting one question more than others.

Other solution may be to distribute equally the score from the discarded question between the other questions. E.g.:

Question1: 6 points
Question2: 2 points
Question3: 8 points

Total score: 16 points

=> Discard Question3 => The Question3's score (8 points) is divided equally between the rest of the questions =>

Question1: 6 + 4 = 10
Question2: 2 + 4 = 6
Question3: 0 points

Total score: 16 points

What do you think about this?

• There's no proper handling for this in a random draw test. Because all the questions must have the same point value in a random draw, you can't throw one out without being unfair to students who didn't get that question.

You are right. This feature only makes sense if you are working with non-random draw tests.