Free text / essay style questions

Creating free text questions on Synap

Free text questions allow your users to enter their own text responses to your questions. They can format their text, use tables to display data and more.

The system cannot mark these questions. If you are using Free Text questions in an exam, you should not set results to release 'Always automatically' as users will receive their results before you have marked them on the quiz configuration.

After selecting the Free Text question type, you will need to enter the question stem, i.e., what question you want users to answer.

On the answer tab, you won't be adding options. You only need to add a text box title, something like Your answer:

There are a number of additional settings you can apply to a free text question which will affect how a user responds:

• Enforce plain text - candidates will have no formatting options

• Show word count - the user's word count will be displayed

• Enable webcam snapshots - there will be an 'Open webcam' button below the text box. On opening, users can take a webcam photo of themselves. This can be used for verification purposes for example

• Disable spellcheck - browser-based spell checkers will be disabled. We cannot guarantee that third party tools like Grammarly will be disabled

• Answer templates - Answer templates allow you to pre-fill a user's free text answer box. This can be a table with headings, or bullet-pointed lists