Negative Marking vs Positive Marking in Quizzes

Electa LMS's quizzing module supports a special "negative marking" option which examiners and trainers can turn on for each quiz. Quizzes (exams) can be marked "positively" or "negatively". Positive marking is used is when marks are awarded for correct answers, but no marks are reduced for wrong answers, while negative marking does both - awards marks for correct answers and reduces marks for wrong given answers.

The Electa LMS Quiz Module supports both positive and negative marking for quizzes. You can choose which one to use for each of the quizzes you create.

Positive Marking

When positive marking is enabled for a quiz (which is the default option) a student who gives a wrong answer to a quiz question gets no marks, but also no marks are reduced from the total score.  This means that theoretically it is possible for students who do not know the answer to guess and if they make a wrong guess there will be no punitive mark for them.

There is another approach however which is widely used in certain educational systems meant to prevent students from guessing. This is the "negative" marking approach.

Negative  Marking

When a student gives a wrong answer to a question instead of receiving no marks a negative mark is awarded. In this scenario the student is being "punished" for guessing.

How are negative marks awarded?

This actually depends on the type of each question, as follows:

Questions with one correct answer which are of type "Select one" or True/False questions will give either the full marks in case of a correct answer or take the same number of marks in case of a wrong answer selected. If, for example a question gives 5 marks and offers three options to choose from with only one correct option will only give 5 marks if the correct option is chosen and in all other cases will take 5 marks of the total quiz score.

Questions of type “select many” (a.k.a. select all that apply) which provide several correct options and give marks only when all correct options are chosen will do so but will additionally reduce marks for each wrong answer selected. Thus, making it possible for the user to end up with a 0 or a negative mark for that question.

Questions of type “select some” which provide several correct options and normally give partial marks for each correct option chosen up to the full marks when all correct options are chosen but give no marks when a wrong option is chosen will reduce marks when an incorrect option is chosen. Such questions will give marks for each correct option chosen and will take marks for each wrong answer.

How are negative marks calculated for "Select All" and "Select Some"

Negative marks are calculated per each incorrect option selected. Each wrong answer chosen carries a negative mark equal to the total marks the question divided by the total number of all available incorrect answers.

For example: A question brings a total of 3 marks. It has 3 correct options and 2 incorrect options the student may choose from. Each incorrect option if selected will bring -1.5 marks (3 marks total divided by 2 incorrect options).