Scoring and difficulty

As learners progress through a course, they gain points for answering questions correctly and they lose points for answering them incorrectly. 

Our analytics system does not report on score since it is only meant to motivate users through the course, and not as a metric to measure course performance.

 

Difficulty

Every course contains two levels of difficulty: Normal and Difficult. Different activities can be set to Normal or Difficult and then only shown to certain users based on their performance in the course.

To specify whether an activity is Normal, Difficult, or both, open your activity and click the Difficulty option:

To read more about activities, click here. 

 

There are several ways that the difficulty level displayed to the user can be changed:

• If a user gets a normal question correct, they are put on the hard difficulty track for their next question.
• If a user gets a hard question wrong, they see a normal question next.
• The initial difficulty level that the user sees can be dictated by how they answer some warm-up questions. Click here to read more about warm-up questions.

All score values are doubled for hard questions.

 

How score is determined

For each question/scenario the user is shown, there is a maximum score they can achieve. This maximum score is the same for every normal-difficulty question/scenario and is configured at a course level (details on how to configure this below). Similarly, there is a minimum score that dictates how many points users can potentially lose for selecting the wrong answer(s). 

The maximum available score is divided among each correct answer in a question, while the minimum score is divided up between all the incorrect choices.

For example, if your max score is 120 and your min score is -120 here are the point values of the answers:

Correct answer 1: +60

Correct answer 2: +60

Incorrect answer 1: -120

Another question in the same course might be scored like this:

Correct answer 1: +40

Correct answer 2: +40

Correct answer 3: +40

Incorrect answer 1: -60

Incorrect answer 2: -60

 

And a hard-difficulty question might be scored like this:

Correct answer 1: +120

Correct answer 2: +120

Incorrect answer 1: -240

 

Configuring scoring

To configure the scoring in your course, go to Course Settings > Interface > Scoring:

 

Enable scoring	If this toggle is disabled, no scoring will be displayed or awarded throughout the course.
Max Score	The maximum points a user will receive for an easy question (hard questions are doubled).
Min Score	The minimum amount of points a user will receive for an easy question (hard questions are doubled).
Category Select Score Label	This changes the text that appears in the top right corner of the category screen:
Header Score Label	This changes the text that appears in the top right corner throughout the course:
Show Possible Points	If this is enabled, the available points will be listed before the activity begins:

 

Attempts

Some activities allow the user multiple attempts to get a question right. This means if they select a wrong answer, they don't immediately fail: they are given another chance to get all the correct answers.

This is only enabled for some activities currently and is only enabled for easy questions if there is more than one incorrect answer.