** Using WeBWorK **

Dear Alberto, what a great suggestion! I wondered about that too. I wanted to see a way for my student to print his(her) questions with submitted answers (at least those that are marked incorrect by the computer) so that (s)he can have a copy when discussing the problems with the instructor. You suggested such a feature for the instructor - but I would also like to have such feature for the student too. Now, we just have to hear from the experts whether such a thing is feasible. .. Raghu

Hi Alberto,

The GatewayQuiz module currently supports this function, but I think it doesn't exist anywhere else. I can definitely see that it would be useful.

Gavin

The hardcopy module currently does not have access to the students answers, and that has implications beyond just whether students can get hardcopy of their solutions. When we get farther along with the "sequential problem" macros (where a multi-part problem is into steps that appear one at a time, for example), it will become important for the hardcopy generator to have access to the past answers so that it can tell how much of the sequential problem to show.

It should be possible to make this happen, though I haven't looked at the code to see exactly what it would take. My impression is that it would not be too difficult, especially if all you want is a bullet list like the correct answer list. If you want to student answers to be "in line" within the problem, that would take more work as the answer macros would have to be adjusted to make that happen.

Of course, the next request you are going to make is that the student answers show indications of which are correct and which are not. At this point, we are getting pretty close to reproducing the results table in the hardcopy. Not a bad idea, but there are some technical issue related to spacing and the fact that some of the messages in that table include raw HTML that could not be translated easily into the required TeX.

Personally, I think it is time to look again at the mechanisms for getting data into that table, and perhaps this would be incentive to do so.

Davide

Okay, how about a "variation on the theme"?

I would like to see the answers that the whole class gave to a particular problem. For instance, if in problem set #X, problem #Y, there are three possible answers (even, odd, neither) and students only get one attempt. I'd like to check to see whether anyone entered "niether" (because whoever wrote the problem didn't allow the student another attempt if the student entered something other than the three options above).

The output would be a spreadsheet, where the rows correspond to the users, and the entries in each row are the user's answers, with the most recent first. Something like:

student1	even
student2	ODD
student3	niether
student4	even

If more attempts were allowed for a problem, I'd get something like this:

student1	3.141592	3.14
student2	2.71828
student3	-1

A column with the correct answer would be a nice addition as well.

--- Christopher Heckman