The drawing Question allows the learner to answer a Question using different drawing tools such as a compass, straightedge (ruler) and text annotations on a provided image.

Figure 1: An example of the drawing Question, using the compass.

This Question type is manually scored. Learner responses must be reviewed and scored by an educator.

As the score is assigned through human judgment, there is no automatic scoring configuration available for this Question type. You cannot define correct answers or scoring rules during Question setup.

Scores are applied after submission as part of the manual grading workflow. Educators evaluate the response using their own criteria, and the score is recorded via Learnosity’s manual grading workflow.

For more information about manual grading in Learnosity, see What is the Grading API?

Creating a Question

Watch the "How to create a Drawing Question" tutorial video.

Enter the Question stem into the Compose question area. Then upload a picture you want to use for your Question in the Image Source field or choose one of our predefined backgrounds. For information about image requirements visit our Images page.

Configuring the toolbar

You can control what tools* the learner will see in their toolbar. The icons highlighted in grey have been enabled, the white icons are disabled. Click on a white icon to enable it, and click on a grey icon to disable it. Use the DIV icons to place dividing lines between icons. These tool options are draggable, you can drag and drop the tools into a different order, and the new order will be displayed on the toolbar.

Note: the compass tool has a minimum radius of 160px.

Figure 2: Creating a drawing Question.

• Special characters: This field will become enabled when you have enabled the special character map in the text formatting options above. What is entered in the field will override the default character map symbols (see example below).

Configuring line color options for the drawing tool

Here you can choose how the line painted over the image will look like. You can also add up to six colors to your color palette.

Figure 3: Line color settings for the drawing tool.

Authors can also select stroke colors and opacity using the color picker tool.

Figure 4: The color picker tool.

More options

Scoring

• Maximum points¹ - The maximum number of points that can be awarded for the Question.
• Minimum points if attempted² - Points awarded to the learner for attempting the Question, regardless of a correct or incorrect response.

'Extra' options

The extras section in the authoring interface allows you to add more information about the Question, information that we refer to as metadata.

There are a number of fields available: acknowledgements, contains math, distractor rationale, distractors, instructor stimulus, rubric reference, sample answer, and stimulus (review only).

To learn more about the options shown in the Extras section, see Understanding the Extras Section of the Question Editor.

1. Note: “Maximum points” replaces the earlier label “Max score”. Version added: v2026.1.LTS

2. Note: “Minimum points if attempted” replaces the earlier label “Minimum score if attempted”. Version added: v2026.1.LTS