Weights and maximum score of a question group

Quick Tip: For a comprehensive understanding of weights and maximum scores, please consult this user guide before proceeding with the details explained below.

The Weights and Maximum Scores gives you additional ways to configure the test. Using the settings shown in the image below, you can change both the maximum scores and weights for individual groups, to get at the desired aggregate maximum score for the test.

Group Weight and Overall Test Weight

Question group weights allow you to give different levels of importance, or weight, to entire sections of your test. Think of it as emphasizing certain topics or skill areas more than others. For instance, you might have a "Pronunciation" group that's crucial for your test, so you could give it a higher weight (say, 70%), while a "Fluency" group might be less critical and receive a lower weight (like 30%).

If you don't assign any specific weights to your question groups, the system will treat all questions as having equal importance by default. For example, if you have two question groups, with a total of 5 questions to be asked then each question will get 20% of the weight.

Pro tip: The total of all the group weights must always add up to 100%.

The weight you give to a whole question group is then divided evenly among the specific questions you choose from that group to be in the test. For instance, if a group has a weight of 30% and contains 4 questions, but you set 3 questions to be asked from the group, each of those 3 questions will have a weight of 10%.

We will consider two combinations of group weights as described below and evaluate its impact on the overall test weight.

Case-1: Group weight for "Pronunciation" group is 70% and "Fluency" group is 30%.

Let us assign a weight of 70% to "Pronunciation" group and 30% to the "Fluency" group, as shown in the image below.

Notice that two random questions are chosen from "Pronunciation" group and one random question from "Fluency" group.

As you can see in the image above, the overall test weight is the total of the weights you assign to each group (in this case, 70% + 30% = 100%). The weight of each individual question is then calculated by dividing the group's weight equally among the questions you've chosen to include from that group.

So, for the "Pronunciation" group, since we set two questions to be asked, each of those questions will carry a weight of 35% (that's the group weight of 70% divided by the 2 selected questions, or 70/2).

Similarly, in the "Fluency" group, we set just one question to be asked and therefore that single question will have the entire group weight of 30%.

Case-2: Group weight for "Pronunciation" group is 90% and "Fluency" group is 60%.

Let us assign a weight of 90% to "Pronunciation" group and 60% to the "Fluency" group, as shown in the image below.

Notice that an error has occurred, because the sum of the group weight is not 100%.

Group Maximum Scores and Aggregate Maximum Scores

With the Maximum Scores setting in the Edit Questions page (as shown in the image below), you can cap the maximum score for the entire test at a lower value than the natural maximum score for the chosen default rubric.

For example, imagine an organization offers language certification at 9 proficiency levels. For the Level 7 test, the expected maximum score is 7. While the test is still scored out of 9, you might choose to cap the maximum score at 7 to match the test's intended difficulty. When this cap is applied, the Detailed Report page will display a max score icon in the right margin, and no score shown will exceed the set cap, as shown in the image below.

To illustrate how to arrive at a desired overall test score, let's consider multiple weight and maximum score combinations in an example test with two question groups containing 3 questions each, as shown in the image below:

Let us assign a maximum score of 8.0 to "Pronunciation" group (with weight of 70%) and 3.0 to the "Fluency" group (with weight of 30%), as shown in the image below:

The aggregate maximum score for the test is determined by a weighted average of the maximum scores of each question group.

The calculation for the scenario shown in the above image is:

[(Maximum score of Pronunciation) x (Pronunciation group weight)] + [(Maximum score of Fluency) x (Fluency group weight)] divided by (100).

Applying the values, we get (8 * 70 + 3 * 30) / (100) = 6.5. This result is highlighted in Red in the top right corner as "Aggregate Max Scores".