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Jason Farmer - Anonymous Problems

Jason Farmer - Anonymous Problems

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicAnonymous Problems topic started 10/11/2002; 3:11:21 AM
last post 10/13/2002; 10:26:36 AM
userJason Farmer - Anonymous Problems  blueArrow
10/11/2002; 3:11:21 AM (reads: 937, responses: 3)
Hello again everyone. I was wondering if there was any way that problems can be submitted anonymously? We are thinking about making a survey for WeBWorK, using WeBWorK. Can answers be submitted anonymously without too much trouble?

If that is not very practical, could a single user be set up, and every time they submit their answers they are saved seperatly for each submission?

I hope you can understand what I am trying to accomplish, let me know if I didn't state it very clearly and I will try to rephrase.

Thanks! Jason

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userArnold K. Pizer - Re: Anonymous Problems  blueArrow
10/11/2002; 3:43:54 AM (reads: 1161, responses: 0)
Hi Jason,

This is how the WeBWorK questionnaires are handled (setSampleQuestionnaires). Look at them to see what we do and the scripts we use to compile the answers. In our case the questionnaire is not totally anonymous for reasons I'll explain below but we tell students that almost nothing they do on the web is totally anonymous and that we will not attempt to identify responses with individuals.

Our questionnaire has both numeric and essay data. If a student submits the questionnaire multiple times, we only want to keep numeric data from the first submittal but we want to append essay data from subsequent submittals to the essay data from the first submittal. Obviously if you only want to allow a student to submit the questionnaire one time, things are much easier and there would be no reason to "identify submittals anonymously".

To "identify submittals anonymously" for the above reason, we tag each submittal with it's PSVN number (the Problem Set Version Number). Since these numbers are unique within a course but not unique within the WeBWorK system and since the questionnaires are given out in 10 or so courses, we set $psvn_digits in Global.pm to a large value (maybe 10. I forget what we used --- this is the birthday "paradox" problem --- look at that and choose a value so that there is an extremely low probability that two students in different courses will have the same PSVN).

So in practice without too much trouble, we could identify students with submitals but we don't as promised. If you only want to give students one attempt or if you are not worried about a single student corrupting the data with multiple submittals, there is no need to "identify submittals anonymously".

You will see in the .pg code the line
$recordSubmittedAnswers =0; ## do not record answers -this is an anonymous survey
so that if you have that and also have
$logAccessData = 0;
then at least as far as WeBWorK is concerned things are anonymous.

Hope this helps a little.

Arnie

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userJason Farmer - Re: Anonymous Problems  blueArrow
10/13/2002; 10:11:10 AM (reads: 1110, responses: 0)
Great Arnie, thanks for your help. I will give it a go!

Jason

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userJason Farmer - Re: Anonymous Problems  blueArrow
10/13/2002; 10:26:36 AM (reads: 1155, responses: 0)
Great Arnie, thanks for your help. I will give it a go!

Jason

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