Scoring open-ended questions in SAS?

[evalencialopez]

Hello,

I am trying to score open-ended questions from an assessment, but I am not sure how to ago about this. For example, I have a question that asks students to write their response as to why they think sea water is not drinking water. I would like to score their responses as "correct, Half point and incorrect" based on their written responses. Is there an easy way to go about this other than manually checking the responses?

Thank you for your advice!~

[ballardw]

The only "automagical" method might involve SAS Text and Content Analytics. Do you have that available?

If not it comes down to keywords and such.

If the actual question is a multiple choice with an option for an "other" open-ended response my first step is typically to see if the open-end can be coded into one of the choices (often possible for some) first. Then look at the remainder.

Without 1) knowledge of the actual question, 2) examples of the actual responses and 3) some idea of the number of responses that's about all. I would mention that instead of your proposed three-point scale I might be tempted to look for similarity of responses first and then "grade" them to your proposed result.

How sure are you that everyone answering the question has been exposed to sea-water? Or are they supposed to be answering based on reading in a text of some sort?

BTW, if your actual question starts with anything that looks like "Why do you think ..." you can't mark anyone as "incorrect" because they answered what they thought as instructed. Your question might require some significant rewording to assign any sort of "incorrect" or "half correct".