Make Cloze questions more useful with Fuzzy Match

Cloze questions (where the student must type an answer of typically one word) are a really useful part of the question mix that goes into every great quiz. The restriction with auto-marking them has been that it’s an all-or-nothing affair. A slight misspelling, or even a failure to capitalise correctly, loses the student the mark. This is entirely appropriate in a spelling test, but it does limit the form.

Now, we have extended Yacapaca cloze questions to offer three modes:

  1. Case-sensitive (strictly requires your exact answer)
  2. Case-tolerant (as above but ignores capitalisation)
  3. Fuzzy match

Fuzzy match lets you give the students more leeway, and it’s capable of giving them partial marks for partially-correct answers. The screencast shows how it works: 2′ 30”; turn the sound up as the record volume was rather low.

Use fuzzy match with discretion. It does let you do more with Cloze, but if you imagine it is going to mark an essay, or even a sentence, you will be disappointed. It’s just a little algorithm, and whilst it is quite clever, it has no common sense whatsoever. For example, against the correct response “god” it will award 0.8 of a mark for “dog”.

Only the most ardent pet-lover would agree.

Fuzzy-match cloze screencast