4.3 Pros and Cons of Short answer questions

Pros

1. The Short answer question type is a constructed response question. That is the student has to construct their own answer and have sufficient confidence to submit it.
2. Modern browsers have an in-built spelling checker and you can ask your students to only submit correctly spelled answers. If I tell you that I have seen 14 different spellings of 'temperature' you will understand that such a variation makes accurate response matching very difficult. Ensuring you are only dealing with correctly spelled words is an important first step.

Cons

The response matching features are too limited.

1. There is no feature for handling synonyms yet we all know that languages are very rich, extensive, fertile, …..
2. There is no feature for accepting a different word order.
3. The browser spelling checker is unlikely to include specialist scientific and medical words. Also it will only use the language used on the computer and will not check the spelling of foreign words.
4. Catering for misspellings is difficult.
5. Unless your required answer is very specific you will have to allow time to check how your response matching copes with real student responses. And also time to adjust your response matching in the light of those answers.