CheckAnswers SubmitAnswers design
Revision as of 21:39, 3 December 2013 by Gage (talk | contribs) (→When are Check Answers and Submit Answers buttons shown?)
Contents
What is the difference between Check Answers and Submit Answers?
- Check Answers does not record the answer in the database.
- While answers that you have entered will remain when you check an answer (short term sticky answers) they will not remain for long. If you leave the problem page and go to the next page and then return, your previous answers will be erased.
- Submit Answers does record answers in the database.
- Whenever you return to a problem page your previous answers are retrieved from the database. So the most recent answers you have submitted are sticky long term.
- With the current database and infra structure there is no way to record answers in the database
but to have them not appear in Student Progress, Student Statistics, Past Answers, the Grades and so forth.
- Use case for Check Answers
- You want the student to be able to practice after the due date and see if their answers are correct but you don't want this to count toward their grades.
- You are viewing a student's problem acting as a student and you want to check if the computer is checking the answer properly -- but you don't want to answer the question so that the student gets credit without having done the problem, and you don't want your answer appearing the past answer record of the student. In this case pushing the "Check Answers" button is the right thing to do.
- You would like your colleagues or students not in the class to be able to see homework sets and try them but you don't want their answers to pollute the grading of the course or the collection of past answers. Assigning these users as guests will allow this under the
Desirable use cases that are not satisfied by the current behavior
When are Check Answers and Submit Answers buttons shown?
- A full answer to this depends on the configuration chosen or overridden in default.config, localOverrides.conf, course.conf and simple.conf(the Course Configuration page).
- See bug #2940 at http://bugs.webwork.maa.org/. It appears that guest users may not be able to see Check Answer buttons until after the
set is closed. Is this desirable?
Discussion about the best default configuration for Check Answers/Submit Answers
- We may need more than one example configuration here since different people will have different requirements.
