How do I use tags and tag weights?

When creating an assessment, the "Tags" and "Tag Weight" fields can help organize and weight your questions, in addition to giving you more insight into your students’ results.

Tags

Tags act as labels that you can apply to the questions on your assessment. They can be used to organize question types, questions that relate to particular chapters, difficulty levels, etc. As long as you use commas to separate them, you can use more than one tag per question. However, be aware that tag weight (see below) applies only to the first tag.

You’re free to use any tags or shorthand that makes sense to you. The following assessment has questions that are tagged as multiple choice (MC), short answer (SA), and chapter one (ch. 1).

If you tag your questions, you’ll be able to analyze each tag after you save your assessment by using the :Mastery Breakdown Options" on the "Analysis" tab.

Note: Tags do not register across assessments. Any tags used on an assessment apply only to that particular assessment.

Also note: a question can have secondary, or even multiple, tags. Separate your tags with commas.

Tag Weight

Tag weight allows you to assign relative values to your tags. This means that certain types of questions (as determined by your tags) count as a set percentage of the assignment, after determining your score for that particular tag. Note: tag weights can only be used in conjunction with a tag; they cannot be used on their own! If a tag weight is entered, but has no corresponding tag, our system will remove that tag weight, essentially making that question not count toward the assessment. Tag weights must also be whole numbers.

This can be very useful for assessments with many questions and sections since it saves you from calculating out ungainly values to enter into the "Point Value" field when you want everything to add up to 100%. However, tag weights do not have to add up to 100 – they are relative to each other, so they can add to any sum.

Using the same assessment, whose tag weights add to 100 for simplicity, the multiple choice section is now worth 50% of the assessment, the short answer questions are 30%, and the chapter 1 questions make up the remaining 20%.

Assign a weight to the first type of tag. Schoolrunner will automatically recognize all other questions with that primary tag and apply the right weight. Weights cannot be applied to secondary tags.

Compare the difference in scores on the same assessment when tag weight is applied.

No Tag Weight (calculated from points achieved out of points possible):

With Tag Weight (calculated according to tag values):

If you contrast the unweighted and weighted scores in this example, you'll see that weighting benefitted most students because (in this particular situation) heavier weights were applied to questions on which students performed better. This shows how tag weights can redistribute the value and weight of a given assessment.