** Using WeBWorK **

You can find the answerEssay.pl file and an example at

    http://cvs.webwork.rochester.edu/viewcvs.cgi/union_problib/examples/answerEssay/?cvsroot=Union+College

This is how it works: the students get a type-in area where they can enter their answer and submit it. They are told that the professor will grade the problem after the due date. When the set has closed, the professor can act as a student to view his or her response. The problem will also display a new type-in area (not available to the student) where the professor can enter the score for the essay. Submitting the answers will record the score.

After the problem is graded, the student can view the score either in the problem list for the homework set (where the scores for all problems are shown) or by viewing the particular problem.

All of this is possible without changes to WeBWorK, but you will need to change the values of some of the permission levels in global.conf (or in a course's course.conf file). This is because the default setting is to NOT allow professors to submit answers after the due date, so that would prevent the professor from saving the grades. (See the comments in the .pl file for details.)

Another setting that you might want to change is the one that controls whether previous answers are shown for students after the due date. This is off by default (so the students can go back and redo the problems for review without seeing their previous solutions), but this also means they would not see their essays and scores when they view the page after it is graded. Alternatively, you can tell the students to check the "show saved answers" box in the options panel at the left in order to see their essay.

In the long run, it would be nice for the professor to have "next student" and "previous student" buttons to make it easier to go from one student to the next, but that would either require changes to WeBWorK (or at least a new module), or the use of a data file that contains the student ids, which would have to be generated before the professor grades the problems.

Anyway, some of you might find this useful, so check it out.

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Just for reference, in case someone goes further with this, the module Preflight.pm -- never completed, is also an attempt in this direction. It might be a useful to have that code as reference in designing a module to accomplish grading essay questions.

The preflight module was a response to a request to have the student's answer saved to a file in the database or on the disk (or just in the lastAnswer facility that already exists in WeBWorK) and then providing an instructor interface for quickly browsing the answers in order to grade them.

The original request was to allow multiple choice questions followed by an essay question. The instructor would be able to select and browse the essay questions based on responses to the multiple choice question.

e.g.

What is a derivative? Explain your answer

    1. The slope of the graph of the function
    2. Bring down the exponent and subtract one
    3. A way to get rich quick

Explanation here:

By making this due shortly before class an instructor would have an idea of which concepts the students were clear on and which ones needed more explanation.

I'd love to have a unit that did this nicely. I already have an example problem that allows a student to enter primitive tex in the explanation box and have it previewed.

-- Unfortunately none of this is available at the moment so your macro file is really welcome.

-- Mike

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You can also use multiple essay questions in one file, so both questions could be marked as "essay" questions, and so graded later by the professor. The only caveat is that with the package as it now stands, each part would need to receive its own grade. It would be possible to give only one grade for the whole problem, but I don't have it set up for that. It might be possible to use the weighted grader that is in the Union macros directory to overcome this deficiency, however, by allowing one part to hold all the points in the problem. I'll check it out and see.

I already posted a means of saving student data to files (though it is a hack) so that it could be read into a later problem. It would not be hard to make a special "master" problem that read all that data in to give a professor a more global view of the answers.

As for the TeX and preview, I think that can be worked out, too. Let me give some things a try... (And here I thought I was done with this one for now :-)

Davide

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-- Mike

DOCUMENT();
$inputs_ref->{myAnswer} =~ s/~~~~/~~~~~~~~/g; #hack to handle backslashes
loadMacros(
PG.pl,
PGbasicmacros.pl,
PGchoicemacros.pl,
PGanswermacros.pl,
PGauxiliaryFunctions.pl
);
sub NAMED_TEX_BOX {
my($name,$row,$col) = @_;
my $essay_name = "${name}_ESSAY_BOX";
$row = 10 unless defined($row);
$col = 80 unless defined($col);
$essay_name = RECORD_FORM_LABEL($essay_name);
my $len = 0.07*$col;
my $height = .07*$row;
my $answer_value = '';
$answer_value = $inputs_ref->{$essay_name} if defined( $inputs_ref->{$essay_name} );
$answer_value =~ tr/$@`//d; ## make sure student answers can not be interpolated by e.g. EV3
my $print_string = $answer_value ||'';
$print_string =~ s/+/\/g; # prevent weirdness with backslashes
$answer_value =~ s/+//g;
my $out = M3(
qq!vskip $height in hrulefillquad !,
qq!begin{rawhtml}<TEXTAREA NAME="${essay_name}" ROWS="$row" COLS="$col"
WRAP="VIRTUAL">$answer_valueend{rawhtml}!,
qq!<TEXTAREA NAME="$essay_name" ROWS="$row" COLS="$col"
WRAP="VIRTUAL">$answer_value!
);
$out = "$HR Answer: $BR". $out;
$out = $out. EV3($BR,"Typeset version of answer:", $BR,$print_string, $HR) if $print_string;
$out.= NAMED_ANS_RULE($name, 10);
$out;
}

TEXT(beginproblem());
$showPartialCorrectAnswers = 0;
BEGIN_TEXT
$HR
Let (R ) be a collection of subsets of (X) with the property that
the intersection of any two elements (A) and (B) of (R) is the union
of elements of (R). ( A cap B = cup I_alpha ) where (I_alphain R).
$PAR

Statement: $PAR The collection of sets (S) which consists of all elements
of (R) and all unions of elements of (R) is a topology.

Show that the statement is true, or supply a counter-example. You can also modify the statement if it's almost true.

END_TEXT

TEXT($PAR,NAMED_TEX_BOX('myAnswer',20, 80));

NAMED_ANS('myAnswer'=>num_cmp(10));

TEXT("$HR This statement is ",ans_radio_buttons(T=>'true',F=>'false',NT=>'nearly true','%d'=>"don't know yet"));
ANS(radio_cmp('T'));

ENDDOCUMENT(); # This should be the last executable line in the problem.

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I have produced two versions of the derivative example problem that you suggested above: one that allows the professor to give a separate score for each part, and one that uses a single score for both parts.

See essay2.pg and essay3.pg in the answerEssay directory that I linked to above.

Davide

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