Creating effective wrong answer responses

When you create an item you provide the correct answer(s) and optionally, wrong answer responses (WARs). Wrong answer responses are statements that students see if they submit an incorrect answer.

• Incorrect; Try Again; x answer attempts remaining: When students submit an incorrect answer, Mastering provides the feedback "Incorrect; Try Again". If the question allows multiple answer attempts, Mastering also informs students how many answer attempts remain. Any wrong answer feedback you provide appears below the Mastering message.
• Wrong answer responses can help coach students to the correct answer. Ideally, wrong answer responses anticipate issues students may have when completing the item.
• Order of wrong answer responses is important: The order in which you enter these is important because when the Mastering system evaluates a student answer, it returns the response for the first matching answer it finds, without evaluating any further answers. Therefore, create specific responses first, followed by more general ones. This ensures that students get the most specific wrong answer response available.
• A wrong answer response can contain a link to a hint. When one or more hints are available in a part, the Link to a hint option is provided for wrong answer responses when working in the Simple Editor.

By default there is only one correct answer for every question, but you can add alternative correct answers.

If the student answer is...	Mastering does this:
Correct	Displays a generic correct message.
Incorrect	Compares the submitted answer to the list of wrong answers that you created, and displays the response for the first matching wrong answer.
Incorrect, but you didn't create wrong answer responses	Compares the submitted answer to a set of default wrong answers and displays the default response that matches.
Incorrect, but there are no default wrong answer responses	Displays the generic wrong answer response "Incorrect; Try Again."

 

See also:

Wrong answer response example

Using wrong answer response tables