The Short Text question requires students to respond to questions that have short, definite answers, for example, 1-2 words, or a number.

Figure 1: Short text question example.

Create a question

Enter a question stem in the Compose Question area.

Follow these steps in order to configure question validation:

• Insert a value in the Point(s) box to set up a mark for the question.
• In the Allow drop-down menu, select either Exact match or Any text containing.
  • If Exact match is selected, what the student enters as a response must exactly match the response set in validation.
  • If Any text containing is selected, once the student enters the text included in the validation it will be marked as correct. Any other text added to the student response is ignored.
    NOTE: a comma-space and period-space are also ignored to ensure the response is scored correct if at a pause in or at the end of a sentence. All other punctuation or special characters included in the validation are required to be entered by the student to score a correct result.
• In the Value field, enter the correct response in the empty box as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Validation using the 'Any text containing' option.

Figure 3: Question using 'Any text containing' option.

• If there is more than one response that can be considered as correct click on the + tab in order to add an alternative correct response. In the new tab enter the response in the empty field. You can also set a specific score for the alternate responses which can be different from the initial correct response.

More options

Scoring

The Scoring section provides additional settings regarding validation:

• Enable Case Sensitive if you want the responses to be validated considering the letters’ case.
• Select Ignore leading and trailing spaces if you want responses that have additional spaces at the beginning or end of the response to marked as correct.
• You can specify the number of characters to be entered in the response box by entering a value in the Character limit field. The maximum value is 250 characters.
• From v2023.3.LTS and onward, you have the option to Enable full or half-width character scoring. For languages such as Japanese, where full-width and half-width characters are used, enabling this option validates responses with either type of character width. For example, in this question: What do we call ‘犬’ in English? And you have set ‘Ｄｏｇ’ (full-width) as the correct answer, if the learner enters ‘Ｄｏｇ’ (full-width) or ‘Dog’ (half-width) these will both be marked as correct responses when this option is enabled.
• From v2025.2.LTS and onward, you have the option to Enable accent sensitivity. For words that have accents, enabling this option will ignore any missing or misplaced accents when validating against the correct response. For example, if the correct response is “café” and a learner enters “cafe” or “cáfe”, they will be marked correct when the option is enabled.
  An additional setting to award partial points is also available when the accent sensitivity checkbox is checked. When the checkbox is checked and there are no accent penalty points, full credit will be awarded regardless of incorrect or missing accents. When the checkbox is checked and there are accent penalty points, partial credit (determined by the accent penalty points value) will be awarded for incorrect or missing accents.
  

Layout

The Layout section allows you to add additional styling to the question:

• Spellcheck and text correction: Check this box to turn on spellcheck in the text entry area. When this box is unchecked, browser spellcheck will be disabled, along with auto-correct, auto-complete, and auto-capitalize on iOS devices. Note: This is a browser feature and may not always be available or supported.
• Input Type menu: defines which keyboard will be displayed by default to the students using tablet devices. Options are Text or Number.
• You can also add a Placeholder in the text input area. It will disappear when the student starts typing text in. 

Enabling Special Characters allows authors to add non-typical letters and symbols in language e.g. ó, ç, ñ or Math and Science e.g. μ, ∞ ,≤, and make them available for the learners. If left blank a default set of characters will display, as shown below. To create a custom Special Characters menu, enter the specific characters into the Characters to display input field.

Figure 4: Default Special Character map.