Using Moodle to automatically grade laboratory exercises

Moodle is well known, widely used open source e-learning application. Its role is to provide framework for delivering educational content, and to enable better communication between students and lecturers. Moodle capabilities also extend far beyond this basic role due to many extensions written by the community. There are many types of Moodle resources available that can be used to deliver lectures. Various types of tests and quizzes can pool questions from custom created databases. Students results can be analyzed identifying questions that were either are too difficult, or to easy to answer. Such questions can be removed from databases without recreating existing tests. In order to improve lecturer productivity, automatic grading is preferred. Typical questions that can be included in tests with automatic grading are multiple choice, short answer, matching pairs, and similar questions types where there are one or more predictable correct answers. However, some student tasks are not so easy to grade automatically. In such situations lecturer must show more creativity when using Moodle, and creating tests. In this paper some examples of laboratory exercises will be shown where goal was to test the student understanding of measuring equipment usage, software application usage, or simulation environment.