Authoring Best Practices

Perl Code

In the future any problems submitted to the OPL will need to have perltidy applied to them.

Functionality

• Check your problem with multiple random seeds.
• Make sure that the question accepts the correct answer, and doesn't accept incorrect answers.
• For any formulas, set an appropriate domain to avoid division by zero, very large values and very small numbers.
• If necessary set an appropriate tolerance for answers.
• Check that the correct answers display in a format that is meaningful to students (e.g. a fraction instead of a decimal). Use Compute() to generate the correct_ans_latex_string, or explicitly set it.
• Check that the hardcopy generates without errors and displays properly.

Macros

• Within the problem loadmacros should only be called once, with all of the necessary macros listed one per line.
• Any macros that are not used by the problem should be removed when copying code from another problem.
• The first macro loaded should be PGstandard.pl, which loads the following macros, so none of them should be explicitly loaded.
  • PG.pl
  • PGbasicmacros.pl
  • PGanswermacros.pl
  • PGauxiliaryFunctions.pl
  • customizeLaTeX.pl
• The last macro loaded should be PGcourse.pl.

MathObjects and PGML

• Any newly authored problem should use MathObjects and PGML

Style and Pedagogy

• If the correct answer is to be chosen from a fixed list of choices, don't use a text box. You can use parserPopUp.pl, parserRadioButtons.pl, parserCheckboxList.pl or parserRadioMultiAnswer.pl.

Obsolete Techniques

• beginproblem should be removed from all problems, as it no longer performs any function.

Obsolete Technique	Current Technique
Old answer checkers (e.g. num_cmp, fun_cmp, str_cmp)	MathObjects answer checkers
Old text processing (e.g. BEGIN_TEXT/END_TEXT, BEGIN_SOLUTION/END_SOLUTION, BEGIN_HINT/END_HINT)	PGML: BEGIN_PGML/END_PGML, BEGIN_PGML_SOLUTION/END_PGML_SOLUTION, BEGIN_PGML_HINT/END_PGML_HINT