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I am thinking about the best way to validate free answers to tests from my upcoming courses site.

I didn't want to have all the questions in radio buttons format, so I decided to use textboxes for some of the answers as it feels more natural to the user.

Now the problem comes when it's time to validate such answers to produce the score.

I've thought about the following approaches

Regular Expressions

Try to match certain structures that a correct answer is very likely to have, or maybe only certain words and score the question if certain percentage of similarity is found.

Peer-review

Let other users rate other peer's answers in exchange of some kind of reward. I would provide some reference answer to compare with and I would only let users rate tests they have already passed, in order to prevent abuse.
I would manually correct the first batch of users, so as to let them progress.

I am aware that the second is probably the best one, because it generates community interaction and it's mostly unattended. But I have a tight schedule and maybe it exists a better solution or approach to the problem that you, this great community, know.

Thanks and have a nice day ;)

Dark_eye
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if you allow free text (that is good in my opinion - because the user may have some good explanation (maybe some you have missed) why he choses a multiple choice answer you considered to be false) you should correct it by hand. Because trying to match the free answer with some fix test pattern let you almost end there you was before with the multimple choice stuff.

The second approach literally asks for being hacked by you students ;)

vlad_tepesch
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