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How are Unit Skills Assessments scored?
This article is intended only for CommonLit School Essentials PRO Plus customers and partners.
How many points is each multiple-choice and short-answer question worth?
Each question on a CommonLit Unit Skills Assessment is worth the same amount of points - including multiple choice and short-answer questions (if assigned) - for a total score of 100 points. For example, if a Unit Skills Assessment has 10 assessment questions, each question is worth 10 percentage points.
To find out the point value for a particular question, simply divide 100 by the number of questions on a particular assessment.
How are multi-select questions (multiple-choice questions that require students to choose more than one correct answer) scored?
An example of a multi-select question would be, “Which TWO of the following answer choices best captures a main idea from the poem?” On these types of questions, students receive full credit for choosing both of the correct answers, half credit if they choose one correct answer, and zero credit if they choose neither of the correct answers.
If a student chooses only one answer choice instead of two, the student will get half-credit if the answer that they chose was one of the two correct answers, or zero credit if they chose neither of the two correct answers.
Alternatively, if the student selects more than two answers, they will receive zero credit for the question, regardless of whether or not they selected any of the correct answers.
How does the short answer grading scale work?
CommonLit uses a four-point scale for short answer responses, and teachers are encouraged to adapt their grading to the policies and templates in use in their schools. While we provide an exemplar guide for each question, we leave it up to teachers to determine whether a student meets or does not meet these expectations.
Actual point values for short-answer responses depend on the number of questions in the assessment. A short-answer question is worth the same number of points as the multiple-choice questions. For example, say an Assessment has 5 assessment questions (4 multiple-choice and 1 short-answer question). In this case, each question is worth 20 percentage points. Scoring the short-answer responses for this assessment would work as follows:
Score of 0 = 0% credit (so, in this case, 0 percentage points out of 20)
Score of 1 = 25% credit (in this case, 5 percentage points out of 20)
Score of 2 = 50% credit (in this case, 10 percentage points out of 20)
Score of 3 = 75% credit (in this case, 15 percentage points out of 20)
Score of 4 = 100% credit (in this case, 20 percentage points out of 20)
See also:
How many points are each multiple-choice and short-answer question worth?