Owing to my as-yet very imperfect knowledge of the WeBWorK and Perl semantics, a question I wrote was counting as incorrect responses to one part of a multi-part question that were, in fact, correct.
The set is already closed.
I now know what changes to make to fix the question. But what do I do to give students credit for their correct answers to that one part that were marked as incorrect by WebWorK?
Note that when I go to the Scoring Tools page, it seems I cannot directly see at a glance who was graded properly and who was not on that one part of the one question. All I can see is the overall score for that question.
I could go through each student's responses one-by-one, but that would take some time, as there are 60 students in the class. (I'll do this, of course, if it's the only way.) But surely there's a much easier way??
Hi Murray,
I think the only easy "solution" would be to mark the problem correct for everyone (which is the "Mark Correct" checkbox on the set editing page). That doesn't address the subtleties of only one part of the problem being affected, however, nor of which students get what part of the problem correct originally.
I don't know of any easy way to manage parts of problems en masse like that.
Gavin
I think the only easy "solution" would be to mark the problem correct for everyone (which is the "Mark Correct" checkbox on the set editing page). That doesn't address the subtleties of only one part of the problem being affected, however, nor of which students get what part of the problem correct originally.
I don't know of any easy way to manage parts of problems en masse like that.
Gavin
I'm very unhappy to hear that response. It seems like a functionality that any on-line homework system ought to have.
Would this work: I reopen the set (i.e., change now-past due date to a near future date) and _I_ act as each user? Would that allow me to do the following?
(1) See their last-submitted answers to all parts of the question;
(2) On the previously-defective part of the question, allow me to submit their last answers -- which were previously marked as incorrect but are actually correct now -- and have this counted now as correct for credit?
Or does acting as a student user not allow me to submit/record results for them?
(1) See their last-submitted answers to all parts of the question;
(2) On the previously-defective part of the question, allow me to submit their last answers -- which were previously marked as incorrect but are actually correct now -- and have this counted now as correct for credit?
Or does acting as a student user not allow me to submit/record results for them?
You do not need to reopen the set in order to submit answers for students; you always have a submit button as an instructor, even when the students don't (and even when you act as a student). What you are suggesting would work, though is pretty inefficient.
I don't know if it would help you, but the Show Past Answers button can be used to see more than one person's answers. When you view past answers, you will see a small form at the top of the page that includes the student ID, the problem number and the set name. You can use an asterisk as a wildcard for any of these (and in fact could use regexp patterns if you wish). So you could see EVERYONE's response to a particular problem by putting "*" in the student ID field.
The problem, of course, is that it doesn't show the problem itself, so you may have a hard time telling what SHOULD be the right answer, but it would at least tell you what of the OTHER parts have been marked correct (they will be in green), and you could use that to help compute the new scores more easily.
My own feeling is that, when there is an error in a problem, it is usually easier just to give everyone credit for that problem rather than trying to work through who actually got it right. The students see this as supporting them through the frustration of working with a broken problem, and the positive feelings this generates concerning how you will handle technical difficulties goes a long way toward providing a better outlook on WeBWorK for those who are frustrated. The loss of one homework problem is a cost that is well worth it, in my experience.
Davide
I don't know if it would help you, but the Show Past Answers button can be used to see more than one person's answers. When you view past answers, you will see a small form at the top of the page that includes the student ID, the problem number and the set name. You can use an asterisk as a wildcard for any of these (and in fact could use regexp patterns if you wish). So you could see EVERYONE's response to a particular problem by putting "*" in the student ID field.
The problem, of course, is that it doesn't show the problem itself, so you may have a hard time telling what SHOULD be the right answer, but it would at least tell you what of the OTHER parts have been marked correct (they will be in green), and you could use that to help compute the new scores more easily.
My own feeling is that, when there is an error in a problem, it is usually easier just to give everyone credit for that problem rather than trying to work through who actually got it right. The students see this as supporting them through the frustration of working with a broken problem, and the positive feelings this generates concerning how you will handle technical difficulties goes a long way toward providing a better outlook on WeBWorK for those who are frustrated. The loss of one homework problem is a cost that is well worth it, in my experience.
Davide
That is helpful about the Show Past Answer Davide - thanks for the information.
I want to say I agree with you 100% about it being both easier to give everyone credit, and conducive to a better outlook on the part of the students.
This is really a separate topic on what sorts of questions work well pedagogically, and I don't know where an appropriate place to exchange ideas about this is.
We've just started using WeBWorK to teach college algebra (and pre-calculus). This is not a very strong group of students. For example an enormous number of them believe that the functions
(x^2 - 2)
and
x^2 - 2
are different (the first one is a horizontal shift of x^2 they think, and the second one a vertical shift) and they become very frustrated that they "don't know the format to get WeBWorK to 'accept' the parentheses."
One thing that seems to be very destructive for these students is problems with showPartialCorrectAnswers = 0. Not only does this undercut the pedagogic value of the problem for the students, but it has a significant negative impact on their outlook, which affects their willingness to put the time in required to actually solve the other problems too.
Most of the time problem authors have set showPartialCorrectAnswers to 0, it is because the problem is a collection of parts, each of which is multiple choice, and they wish to make it harder for students to get the answer by guesswork.
In discussing this here it raises the pedagogical questions "What is homework for?" and "When are multiple choice problems useful questions to ask?"
After some discussion our consensus is that most of us expect students to use the homework to learn how to do the problems. Generally speaking multiple choice questions are good for testing to see if students have already learned how to do the problems.
The particular course we are most concerned with here (because of the sheer number of students) is college algebra, and in this course we emphasize graph sketching for various simple functions, their translates and scalings. These are often hard skills to learn by doing WeBWorK problems since what we want is for the students to sketch graphs! (Of course the paper system doesn't work very well either - they sketch something, it is often wrong, and they find out a week later when they don't care.)
The consensus is that teaching graph sketching skills via homework problems isn't enough (WeBWorK or otherwise).
I want to say I agree with you 100% about it being both easier to give everyone credit, and conducive to a better outlook on the part of the students.
This is really a separate topic on what sorts of questions work well pedagogically, and I don't know where an appropriate place to exchange ideas about this is.
We've just started using WeBWorK to teach college algebra (and pre-calculus). This is not a very strong group of students. For example an enormous number of them believe that the functions
(x^2 - 2)
and
x^2 - 2
are different (the first one is a horizontal shift of x^2 they think, and the second one a vertical shift) and they become very frustrated that they "don't know the format to get WeBWorK to 'accept' the parentheses."
One thing that seems to be very destructive for these students is problems with showPartialCorrectAnswers = 0. Not only does this undercut the pedagogic value of the problem for the students, but it has a significant negative impact on their outlook, which affects their willingness to put the time in required to actually solve the other problems too.
Most of the time problem authors have set showPartialCorrectAnswers to 0, it is because the problem is a collection of parts, each of which is multiple choice, and they wish to make it harder for students to get the answer by guesswork.
In discussing this here it raises the pedagogical questions "What is homework for?" and "When are multiple choice problems useful questions to ask?"
After some discussion our consensus is that most of us expect students to use the homework to learn how to do the problems. Generally speaking multiple choice questions are good for testing to see if students have already learned how to do the problems.
The particular course we are most concerned with here (because of the sheer number of students) is college algebra, and in this course we emphasize graph sketching for various simple functions, their translates and scalings. These are often hard skills to learn by doing WeBWorK problems since what we want is for the students to sketch graphs! (Of course the paper system doesn't work very well either - they sketch something, it is often wrong, and they find out a week later when they don't care.)
The consensus is that teaching graph sketching skills via homework problems isn't enough (WeBWorK or otherwise).
We have some protypes for asking students to do curve sketching. The main reason we're not further along is that these "draw a graph" questions aren't quite as vital to the more advanced courses many of us have been teaching.
Here is an example
http://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/applet_dev/Graphic_input_applets/1/
You can log in as guest to view it.
There are a few people working on flash applets that do similar things and have more bells and whistles -- but if the development is responding to immediate needs it will probably go faster. :-)
Here are some slightly different examples:
http://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/applet_dev/PointAndGraph_AppletDemos
On the ability to enter formula question -- strongly encourage the students to use the preview button to get the typeset answer. It doesn't solve everything but it helps.
Here is an example
http://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/applet_dev/Graphic_input_applets/1/
You can log in as guest to view it.
There are a few people working on flash applets that do similar things and have more bells and whistles -- but if the development is responding to immediate needs it will probably go faster. :-)
Here are some slightly different examples:
http://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/applet_dev/PointAndGraph_AppletDemos
On the ability to enter formula question -- strongly encourage the students to use the preview button to get the typeset answer. It doesn't solve everything but it helps.
Davide Cervone wrote, "You do not need to reopen the set in order to submit answers for students; you always have a submit button as an instructor, even when the students don't (and even when you act as a student)...."
But this does not seem to be valid: The due date has passed. I select a student from the classlist and open the set as that student, then go to a problem. There is NO Submit Answer button now -- only Preview Answers, Check Answers, and Past Answers.
Moreover, if I enter an answer (or just leave the student's answer already there) and then press the Check Answers button (with, say Show Correct Answers checked), the page that results explicitly says at the top, in red print:"ANSWERS ONLY CHECKED -- ANSWERS NOT RECORDED"
But this does not seem to be valid: The due date has passed. I select a student from the classlist and open the set as that student, then go to a problem. There is NO Submit Answer button now -- only Preview Answers, Check Answers, and Past Answers.
Moreover, if I enter an answer (or just leave the student's answer already there) and then press the Check Answers button (with, say Show Correct Answers checked), the page that results explicitly says at the top, in red print:"ANSWERS ONLY CHECKED -- ANSWERS NOT RECORDED"
There is a preference in global.conf which determines this behavior:
record_answers_when_acting_as_student => undef,
one needs to switch undef to "professor" so that you can answer student questions for them. This can be a dangerous power to enable because it is fairly easy to answer a student question inadvertently (for example while trying to see why the computer won't accept the student's answer) and that record cannot be undone very easily.
You can enable this power in a single course by placing
$permissionLevels{record_answers_when_acting_as_student}="professor";
at the end of the course.conf file.
Let me join the chorus: I haven't found that it's worth a few points and a lot of time to fix this situation precisely (i.e. correct each student answer). Give all the students full credit and move on. If it seems like a situation that reoccurs frequently we can invent more convenient tools to resolve it, but so far it seems to me like something that happens once, or at most occasionally and that giving everyone full credit for a botched problem is an easy, low stress solution that does no harm.
record_answers_when_acting_as_student => undef,
one needs to switch undef to "professor" so that you can answer student questions for them. This can be a dangerous power to enable because it is fairly easy to answer a student question inadvertently (for example while trying to see why the computer won't accept the student's answer) and that record cannot be undone very easily.
You can enable this power in a single course by placing
$permissionLevels{record_answers_when_acting_as_student}="professor";
at the end of the course.conf file.
Let me join the chorus: I haven't found that it's worth a few points and a lot of time to fix this situation precisely (i.e. correct each student answer). Give all the students full credit and move on. If it seems like a situation that reoccurs frequently we can invent more convenient tools to resolve it, but so far it seems to me like something that happens once, or at most occasionally and that giving everyone full credit for a botched problem is an easy, low stress solution that does no harm.
This permission can be changed from within Webwork. In the course in question, click on "Course Configuration", then "Permissions" at the top. One of the choices is "Can submit answers for a student". This seems a little easier than having to manually edit configuration files.
You're right, Danny. I'd forgotten that you could edit this preference from the web. -- Mike
Ah -- much easier, and probably a bit safer in that it's quicker to revert to the default "nobody" behavior.
As to comments that the best thing might be to give everybody credit: I'd like to do that, except that there were a number of students who did not even attempt this problem (and some who did not do the set at all). I have strong reservations about giving them credit. One reason is my past experience that students who do the work resent others getting credit who did not do the work; they consider this lack of fairness by the instructor.
As to comments that the best thing might be to give everybody credit: I'd like to do that, except that there were a number of students who did not even attempt this problem (and some who did not do the set at all). I have strong reservations about giving them credit. One reason is my past experience that students who do the work resent others getting credit who did not do the work; they consider this lack of fairness by the instructor.