Student Systems

Use best 2 out of 3

This complex assessment scenario explores the setup needed to calculate an assessment outcome using the "Use Best" facility within EUCLID.

Where an assessment includes more questions than are required to be answered, the "Use Best" function must be used. This will instruct the system to take the highest marks achieved for the number of required questions, and ignore any additional, lower marks (if a student has attempted more questions than were required).

In the "Set Up Assessments" screen, press the "Build Structure" button and add an assessment. If you are unsure how to do this, please see the basic assessment set up page.

Give the assessment a name, a type (exam/coursework) and a weighting, press "Save and Continue".

From within the new assessment, press "Add component", provide a name and a weighting for this component, and select "yes" from the "Use Best Answers" drop down list. Enter the number of items to be used in the new box which will have appeared. On pressing save, a new component and its related item will be created, and the number of items to be used in the use best calculation will be shown.

use best button

 

use best overview

Below are some key points about "Use Best":

  • "Use Best" can be activated on component setup or by editing a component
  • "Use Best" requires an entry of how many item(s) you wish to use in the calculation, e.g. take the best x items
  • "Use Best" can be activated before items are created but will not work unless you have items hanging off a component
  • The number of item(s) you wish to take the best of from cannot exceed the total number of items 
  • "Use Best" will take the highest value(s) entered against an item(s) for the specified value and use that in the calculation

 

An example of this scenario structure can be seen below where the assessment "Exam" has two components (Section A and Section B), each with three questions. Section A has had "Use Best" added to it, instructing the system to calculate using the marks from the best 2 answers (regardless of whether the third question has been attempted), producing a 50/50 weighting. Section B requires the marks from all three questions to be used in the calculation resulting in a weighting of equal thirds.

use best view print