Quest Ladder
TeachFORGE.ai
Quest Ladder / Shared settings
Shared settings: scoring, timing and hint timing
Set the marks, the clock and the hint penalties once, and every question this type generates follows them.
Set it on the type. Forget it on the question.
Seven tabs
Shared settings holds everything that applies to every question generated from this type, rather than to one of them. The panel is headed Shared content (scoring, timing & assessment knobs) and has seven tabs.
| Tab | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Scoring | Max Marks — what a perfect answer is worth. |
| Timing | Target and maximum seconds, and the time bands built from them. |
| Hint timing | When each hint unlocks and what taking it costs. |
| Answer policy | How an answer is compared. Covered in Answer policy. |
| Extra settings | The per-format knobs. Covered in Extra settings. |
| Mastery gate | What counts as having learned this. Covered in The mastery gate. |
| Repetition schedule | When to check they still remember. Covered in The repetition schedule. |
Timing and the bands
Target Seconds is how long you expect a competent learner to take. Max Seconds is the point past which more time is not telling you anything.
From those two the Time Bands table is filled: each row has a Label, a Min (s), a Max (s) and a Multiplier. The multiplier scales the marks, so a fast correct answer can be worth more than a slow one.
Changing target or maximum seconds refills the whole table from those two times. If you have hand-tuned a band, adjust the times first and the bands afterwards, or your tuning is silently overwritten.
Time bands are a judgement about your subject. Rewarding speed is right for recall drill and wrong for a problem that deserves thinking time; where it is wrong, flatten the multipliers to 1 or turn timing pressure off at the ladder level instead.
Hint timing defaults
Each hint gets two numbers: Hint {{n}} after (seconds), when it becomes available, and Marks deducted, what taking it costs. Add hint timing and Remove hint timing manage the rows.
These are the defaults for the type. The hint text itself is written on its own step in the Content stage, and that step shows the unlock time and deduction set here rather than letting you set them twice.
A hint with no deduction is a free answer if it is too specific, and a hint with a heavy deduction is one nobody takes. The useful middle is a small cost on a hint that redirects rather than solves.
How the final mark is composed
The help popover in this panel spells the arithmetic out, and it is worth knowing because it explains marks that look wrong:
Final marks = (the fraction the answer got right) × max marks × the time-band multiplier − the hint deductions.
So a learner who answers correctly, slowly, after two hints can score well below full marks on a question they got right. That is usually the intention. When it is not — when you want correctness to be the only thing measured — flatten the multipliers and set the deductions to zero, rather than explaining the surprise afterwards.
The marking queue shows this composition live as you type a mark, so on a hand-marked question you can see what the number will become before you commit to it.