Weights, Max Scores, Timers

The Weights | Max Scores | Timers dropdown menu gives you additional ways to configure the assessments.

Using these settings, you can change both the maximum scores and question weights for individual questions, to get at the desired maximum achievable assessment score.

You can also change the default amounts of time assigned to the prep and recording timers.

Question weights

Question weights are used to give more or less importance, or weight, to specific questions. You could have several questions where, for example, one of them is worth half the marks (50%) because it's critical in some way. And/or you could have one of them be set to 0% weight because, say, it's a warm-up question that doesn't need grading.

If you don't assign any weights to your questions, they all get treated as having equal weight across the board by default. For example, if you create four questions, each gets assigned 25% by default. If you create five, each gets 20%, and so on.

When you assign your own custom weights to individual questions, the sum total must be 100%. For example, with four questions, you could assign any of the following valid combinations of weights (or any others that add up to 100):

[10%, 50%, 15%, 25%] or

[10%, 20%, 30%, 40%]

[50%, 30%, 20%, 0]

Maximum scores

For example, here is what it looks like when Speechace is selected as the default:

This default rubric comes with its own natural maximum score. In the case of Speechace, the scores are out of 9 points total as seen above.

With the Maximum Scores setting on the Create custom assessment page, you can cap the maximum score for the entire assessment at a lower value than the natural maximum score for the chosen default rubric.

For example, say, a school has 9 levels. At the 9th level, you expect students to reach the full 9 points. For a level-8 test, however, you might want to cap the maximum allowable score to the correct level of 8. If you do so, the test will still be out of 9, but the cap of 8 (for example) will be noted by a max score icon on the right margin of the Detailed Report page, and none of the actual scores will exceed that number.

Here is what this might look like with CEFR chosen as the default rubric:

The way to arrive at this overall assessment maximum score is by assigning max scores to each individual question on the Create custom assessment page, and adjusting them until the desired aggregate value is reached.

Here is what this looks like in practice, with simple individual-question max scores that average out to a 5.0 total assessment max score:

This is because, when no weights are indicated, all questions are given equal weight by default and therefore the max assessment score is capped at (2.0 + 4.0 + 6.0 + 8.0)/4 = 5.0

This screenshot is identical to the following set up wherein each question has been given an explicit weight of 25%:

The maximum allowable total assessment score is actually the weighted sum of all the individual question maximum scores. Each weight is multiplied by its associated individual score, and then they get added up to produce the overall max score. This is why, when the weights are even for each question (as above), the weighted average is simply the average of the maximum scores.

Here is an example of how the distribution of weights combined with distinct maximum scores assigned to individual questions combine to produce the overall maximum score for the assessment:

And here are some more examples, with simpler math:

Timers

There are two timers you can set on the main Create custom assessment screen to control how much time to give to the test taker:

Preparation timer: to prepare their answer
Recording timer: to record their answer

By default, these are set to 30 and 60 seconds, respectively. However, you could change those to any available values in the dropdown menu of each field.

For example, let's say you change them to 5 seconds of preparation time and 30 seconds of recording time:

The resulting countdown timers look as follows to the test taker: