21. Open Response Assessments for Students

21.1. Introduction to Open Response Assessments

Open response assessments allow you to submit a short written answer, an essay, or a file such as an image or computer code file.

When you come to an open response assessment problem, you see the name of the problem, the assessment types, the text of the question, the field where you’ll enter your response, and the Save and Submit buttons.

If an open response assessment asks you to submit a file, you’ll also see a button that you’ll click to upload your file.

• In a peer assessment, you grade responses that your peers have submitted while several of your peers grade your response. For more information, see Peer Assessment.

You’ll answer open response assessment problems in much the same way that you answer other problems. For more information about how to submit responses, see Submit a Response.

After you submit your response, your score will be available shortly - sometimes within a few minutes. For information about how to access your score after your response has been graded, see Access Scores and Feedback.

If you want to experiment with open response assessments, you can try out the open assessment problems in the EdX Demo course. To get started, go to the Self-Assessed Essay unit, and then enter a response in the Response field under the question. You can enter your own response, or you can use one of the sample responses in the Sample Answers unit.

21.2. Submit a Response

Submitting a response is slightly different if you’re submitting a written response or uploading a file.

1. Enter the response that you want to submit.

   • If you’re submitting a written response, type your response in the Response field.
   • If you’re uploading a file, click Choose File under the Response field. In the dialog box that opens, select the file that you want to upload, and then click Open.

2. Click Submit, and then click OK in the dialog box to continue.

   Note

   If you want to save your response and work on it again later, click Save. An “Answer saved, but not yet submitted” message appears directly under the Save and Submit buttons.

After you submit your response, the assessment types start running in the order in which they appear in the problem. For more information, see Peer Assessment.

21.4. Peer Assessment

In a peer assessment, several students in the course grade your response while you grade other students’ responses. You have to grade a number of your peers’ responses before you receive your score. (After you grade the minimum number of responses required to receive your score, you can grade as many additional responses as you want.)

After you submit your response for grading, the following message appears under your response.

Your response has been submitted. Please check back later for your grade.

Warning

In peer assessments, the due date is the date by which you must not only submit your own response, but finish grading the required number of your peers’ responses.

21.4.1. Peer Grading Interface

The area where you’ll grade responses is the peer grading interface. Each course that has peer assessments has at least one peer grading interface. There may be just one peer grading interface for the whole course, or each individual problem may have its own separate peer grading interface.

21.4.2. Perform a Peer Assessment

Warning

In peer assessments, the due date is the date by which you must not only submit your own response, but finish grading the required number of your peers’ responses.

Performing a peer assessment has several steps. You can find detailed instructions for each step below.

1. Step 1: Access responses from other students, either in the body of the course or from the Open Ended Console page.
2. Step 2: Learn to grade (this process is called calibration).
3. Step 3: Grade responses from other students.

21.4.2.1. Step 1: Access responses from other students

Note You can only grade a response if you’ve submitted a response to the question, an instructor has already graded at least 20 responses, and there are more essays from other students left to grade. If you haven’t submitted a response or no responses are available for grading, you see a yellow message in the interface.

There are several ways to access other students’ responses, depending on the way that the course is set up.

• Through the Open Ended Console page. This option is always available for every course. To access the Open Ended Console page, click the Open Ended Panel tab at the top of any page in the course. When you see the list of problems that have responses available to grade, click the name of the problem that you want to open it.

  

• Through the courseware, in a specific unit. This option is only available if the instructor has included a peer grading interface for the problem in the body of the course. To access responses in the courseware, go to the unit that contains the open response assessment problem. Scroll down past the response that you submitted until you see the peer grading interface that appears below the problem.

  

• Through the courseware, in a separate section. This option may not be available for your course. If it is, you’ll see the section for peer grading in the course accordion on the left side of your screen. For example, MIT’s 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course has a separate section that holds all the course peer grading interfaces. To access peer grading for a problem, you click the problem name.

  

21.4.2.2. Step 2: Learn to grade

Before you grade your peers’ responses, you must learn to grade the same way that an instructor would. In this process, called calibration, you’ll grade several responses that an instructor has already graded. If your grading is similar to the instructor’s, you can begin grading other students’ responses to the question.

1. Click the name of the problem. When the Learning to grade page opens, click Start learning to grade.

2. When the problem opens, compare the student’s response with the rubric. Select the options that best apply to the response, and then click Submit.

3. Review the How did I do? message that you receive, and then click Continue.

   

   When you click Continue, the next student response appears for you to grade, and you see a yellow Calibration essay saved message in the top left corner of the page.

4. Continue to grade responses. After you grade the required number of responses correctly, you receive a Ready to grade! message. You can then start to grade responses for other students.

21.4.2.3. Step 3: Grade responses

When you grade a peer assessment response, you can not only select options in the rubric, but also provide additional feedback for the student who submitted the response.

1. When the response opens, select the options in the rubric that you feel best apply to the response, as you did in the calibration process.

   If you have concerns about the response, you can select other options to flag the response for instructor review. You don’t have to fill out the rubric before you select these options.

   • If you aren’t sure how to grade the response, select the I am unsure about the scores I have given above check box.
   • If the response is offensive, or if you suspect that it contains plagiarized material, select the This submission has explicit, offensive, or (I suspect) plagiarized content check box.

2. Under Written Feedback, write a comment about the score that you gave the response.

3. Click Submit. You see a Successfully saved your feedback message at the top of the screen, and the next response opens.

4. Continue to grade until you’ve graded the required number of responses (usually 3). When you’ve graded enough responses, you receive the following message.

   

   When you see this message, you can access the score for your own response. For more information, see Access Scores and Feedback.

If you want to grade additional responses at any time, you can go back to the Peer Grading page and click the name of the problem that you want to continue grading.

Note

When a response opens for you to grade, it leaves the current “grading pool” that other instructors or students are grading from, which prevents other instructors or students from grading the response while you are working on it. If you do not submit a score for this response within 30 minutes, the response returns to the grading pool (so that it again becomes available for others to grade), even if you still have the response open on your screen.

If the response returns to the grading pool (because the 30 minutes have passed), but the response is still open on your screen, you can still submit feedback for that response. If another instructor or student grades the response after it returns to the grading pool but before you submit your feedback, the response receives two grades.

If you click your browser’s Back button to return to the problem list before you click Submit to submit your feedback for a response, the response stays outside the grading pool until 30 minutes have passed. When the response returns to the grading pool, you can grade it.

21.6. Access Scores and Feedback

For peer assessments, you’ll access your scores through the Open Ended Console page.

1. In the EdX Demo course, click the Open Ended Panel tab at the top of the page.
2. On the Open Ended Console page, click Problems You Have Submitted.
3. On the Open Ended Problems page, check the Status column to see whether your responses have been graded. The status for each problem is either Waiting to be Graded or Finished.
4. If Finished appears in the Status column for the problem you want, click the name of the problem to see your score for that problem. When you click the name of the problem, the problem opens in the courseware.

For peer assessments, the score appears below your response in an abbreviated version of the rubric.

For peer assessments, you can also see the written feedback that your response received from different graders.

If you want to see the full rubric for either an AI or peer assessment, click Toggle Full Rubric.

Note

For a peer assessment, if you haven’t yet graded enough problems to see your score, you receive a message that lets you know how many problems you still need to grade.

For more information about grading peer assessments, see Peer Assessment.