Authoring Best Practices

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 (see Tolerances and Limits).
• If necessary set an appropriate tolerance for answers (see Tolerances and Limits).
• 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 (using the "Generate Hardcopy" tab at the bottom of the problem editor).

Macros

• Within the problem loadMacros should only be called once, with all of the necessary macros listed. Macro files will load their dependencies, so you do not need to load them explicitly (e.g. if you load PGML.pl you do not need to load MathObjects.pl).
• 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 a drop-down menu, radio buttons, check boxes.
• For cases where the answer may have different forms, you can use radio multi-answer.

Perl Code

In the future any problems submitted to the OPL will need to be formatted using the standards of the project. As of WeBWorK 2.18 this can be done from the WeBWorK Problem Editor using the "Reformat the code using perltidy" action in the "Format Code" tab. Advanced users can accomplish this using the pg/bin/perltidy-pg.pl script.

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