ANGEL Tip – Essay, Short Answer, and Fill in the Blank Questions

There are 10 different types of questions you can use in an ANGEL assessment, but three of these question types must be graded manually (that means you!) while the others are graded automatically in ANGEL. Of these three manually graded question types, the most commonly used are:

1. Short Answer
2. Essay

For these types of questions, the student must type an answer into a text field. After submitting the assessment, the rest of the questions will be graded, but any short answer and/or essay questions will be left ungraded until you go in and grade them. After you grade them, the score for the assessment will be totaled and entered into the grade book.

You can grade these types of questions by going to the assessment and clicking on the Utilities link. Then select Grade by Question . You will see a list of submissions and can click on each one to grade the questions. You can either leave student names hidden, or display student names to see whose answer you are grading.

Note: Fill in the Blank questions can be graded automatically by ANGEL! You can enter answer options that you will accept as correct, but you must be very careful that you type your options exactly. Be especially careful about spaces, capitalization, and punctuation. You can enter more than one option for each blank. For instance, if the answer is “dog” but you will also accept “canine” or “K-9”, you can enter each choice as a correct option for that blank.

Thanks to Tracy Newman, Sr. Ed. Tech. Center Analyst at JCCC for this tip.

ANGEL Tip: Dropping the Lowest Grade

In the ANGEL Grade Book if you choose to drop the lowest grade, by using the “Drop Lowest” option for a Category, you may still want to see which grade was dropped (the ANGEL Grade Book does not show which grade was dropped). However, you can go to reports and run a report on a given student and the dropped items will appear in gray.

You may also wonder if a category is set to drop the lowest grade and there is an “extra credit” item in the category, will the extra credit item get dropped if it is lowest scored item? Or what if the extra credit item is not completed by the student? You would not expect extra credit items to be dropped and that is how ANGEL behaves. The extra credit item is not dropped.

Use of Secure Browser in ANGEL

Some faculty when setting up assessments have selected the High - requires Secure ANGEL browser option when they establish Browser Security (You select the Settings link under the assessment name and then go to the Access tab). The Secure Browser setting means (for all practical purposes) the student must take the test in the JCCC Testing Center (that’s the only location on our campus where we’ve installed the Secure Browser). A better option is selecting None or Medium for Browser Security.

Cure for Slow Manage Tab

At JCCC, we were experiencing a significant slowdown when faculty used the ANGEL Manage tab (to access Roster, Grade Book and so on). We're running ANGEL 7.3. ANGEL has supplied a fix (December 2009) that we have not yet tested, but attributed the slowdown to the Course Theme Selector nugget on the Manage tab (which is available for each course). There is another link for the Course Theme Selector on the Manage tab in the Course Settings nugget that does the same thing. To avoid the slowdown we’ve removed the Course Theme Selector nugget on the Manage tab and to change the course theme, faculty would need to use the link under the Course Settings nugget.