Test Scoring & Rounding

Introduction

When you create a quiz or exam in Auralia & Musition (under Tests), you can set the number of marks and the rounding method that is used per entry. This allows great flexibility to the weighting that you can apply to different entries within the quiz, but it does require some consideration of the question type that is being included to ensure that the student's level of mastery is clearly reflected. Here are a few examples:

Interval recognition question: Multiple-choice

In this case it probably makes sense to just assign a single mark to each question in the entry.  Auralia will check if the student has selected the correct interval and award 1 mark if they have. The rounding setting will have no affect since the answer is either going to be completely correct or completely incorrect. The only time you would consider assigning more marks would be if you wanted to give interval recognition questions more weighting within the quiz.

Harmonic Dictation: Enter the Roman numerals

Let's consider two cases where the student gets 6 chords correct out of a 10-chord progression.

Case 1: Marks = 1 mark per question, Rounding = Round nearest

In this situation, Auralia will have to multiply 6/10 x 1 mark = 0.6 marks, which then gets rounded to the nearest whole number which = 1/1, thereby giving the student 100% for that question. Most people would probably argue that's not actually representative of the student's level of mastery.

Case 2: Marks = 12 marks per question, Rounding = Round down

In this case, the student would get 6/10 x 12 marks = 7.2 which then gets rounded down to 7, resulting in a score of 7/12 = 58%. This is a much fairer representation of the student's level of mastery.

Summary

So, whilst it will vary depending on the question type and the content, we generally recommend that for question like dictation, or rhythm tapping, or anything with multiple assessable elements, that you increase the number of available marks and also set the rounding to round down.