In Canvas, instructors can give students partial marks for questions that allow multiple answers or require that they select every correct option. The possible options differ slightly when using either the New Quiz or Classic Quiz types, so this article will demonstrate the setup using a few examples. 

Partial Credit Setup

The option to enable partial credit is available only for Matching and Multiple Answer questions. When building these question types, instructors must either award marks based on the number of correct answers and deduct marks for the number of incorrect answers (right minus wrong) or award no marks unless an exact match is given.

In this sample Multiple Answer question, three choices are correct and three choices are incorrect:

The grading options for the question may be either 'Partial credit with penalty' or 'Exact match,'

New Quiz results

For the example MC question above with six choices and three correct and three incorrect answers, this would produce the following results:

Partial credit, one mistake = 1/3 awarded
Partial credit, two mistakes = 0/3 awarded
Exact match, one mistake = 0/6

For a similar Matching question, we would get the following results:

Partial credit, with one mistake = 5/6 awarded
Partial credit, with two mistakes = 4/6 awarded
Exact match, one mistake = 0/6 awarded

Instructors should test all their grading scenarios using the "View As Student" feature in Canvas.

Partial Grading in Classic Quizzes

A Canvas Classic Quiz has no differential grading options. This quiz type allows only partial credit grading.

As an example, we created one Matching and one Multiple Answer question in a sample exam with six choices each and three correct and three incorrect answers.

For the Matching question, we got the following results:

First test, one mistake = 5/6
Second test, two mistakes = 4/6

For the Multiple Answer question, we got the following results:

First test, one mistake = 1/3
Second test, two mistakes = 0/3

Instructors should test all their grading scenarios using the "View As Student" feature in Canvas.