Lesson 3: Creating a Short Answer Exercise

JQuiz creates short-answer quizzes in which the student types in a word or a sentence in response to a question. The sentences are checked against as many correct answers as you provide, and the feedback shows which parts of a student's answer are correct. The student can ask for a hint if necessary, and see the next correct letter in the answer.

See a demonstration of a short answer exercise

Assignment: In this lesson, you will create a 5-question short answer exercise. Time: 1 hour

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Step 1: Open Hot Potatoes and click on the JQuiz potato.

This is the main window for the JQuiz program:

Step 2: Enter an exercise title and save

The title of the exercise or quiz you are currently working on should be entered in the box next to Title. It will become the main heading of the Web page you create. Save the file as lastname_jquiz (for example, my file would be tyler_jquiz) into your Exercises folder. The program will automatically add a .jqz extension to your file. Once again, save your file regularly throughout this lesson!

Step 3: Enter a question

Type your question in the box under Question. To move from question to question, click on the up or down arrows next to the question number. You may have as many questions as you want (unless your copy of Hot Potatoes is unregistered). The number of the current question appears in the box underneath Item. Use the up and down arrows to move through your questions.

Step 4: Enter your current answers

JQuiz allows you to specify an unlimited number of different correct answers that will be acceptable. You may include as many answers as you want for each question but only four are visible at one time. This means that you can allow for variations in word-order, punctuation or vocabulary. Use the small up and down arrows between the question box and the answer boxes to scroll up and down in your answers to the current question. As you scroll, the answer numbers on the left of the window will change. The more possible corrects you enter, the longer it takes the page to check the student's work. If you don't need to allow multiple correct answers, just leave the last three boxes blank.

Special note: you should make sure your correct answers are all plain text only. If you use symbols, such as "<" or ">", it may be interpreted as HTML code.

Step 5: Configure your potato

The configuration for JQuiz includes a lot of prompts, because the exercises give extensive feedback to the student about the answer he or she has entered.

You can configure miscellaneous features such as the title, instructions, feedback, and the appearance of colors on your web page by clicking on the configuration button shown at the top of the window and clicking on individual tabs (Click here for a description of the button bar). To return to the main exercise window, click on the edit exercise button (the button with the numbers 1, 2, 3).

Special JQuiz note: you can choose (on the Other panel of the Configuration window) whether to make answer-checking case sensitive or not. In normal circumstances, if you are making short-answer quizzes, it would probably make sense to have case-sensitivity switched off, so that it doesn't matter whether the student enters an answer in upper case or lower case. However, if your quiz asks for answers in sentences (as for example in the case of a grammar exercise), then using the correct case where necessary might be part of the exercise. In this case, case-sensitivity should be turned on.

I would also recommend removing buttons (click on the button tab) from your potato unless you plan on making your web exercises link to each other. For more details about configuring your JBC potato, click here.

Step 8: Make a web page!

Proceed to Lesson 4 - Creating a jumbled sentence exercise using the JMix potato!