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Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

by Danny Glin -
Number of replies: 5
This semester we have a couple of courses that are using WeBWorK for the first time.  Whenever this happens, there is an initial confusion among students when they submit their answers.

When they submit an answer, they see "Answer Preview", and interpret this as being a preview of the correct answer.  This inevitably leads to many emails to instructors of the form "WeBWorK shows my answer is identical to the correct answer, so why did it mark it wrong?"

Does anyone else experience this?  If so, do you have any solutions?  One thing I've done is I've changed the text from "Answer Preview" to "Your Answer Previews As" (inspired by similar wording used in gateway quizzes), which will hopefully make it clear to students that they are seeing their own answers.

Thanks,
Danny
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

by Louis Zulli -
Yes, we see this occasionally. Not enough that we've worried about it.

Perhaps the buttons could read "Preview Submission" and "Submit". Other variations come to mind too, but using "Answers" here does seem problematic.
In reply to Louis Zulli

Re: Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

by Jason Aubrey -
Hi Danny,

One solution to this is that you can create your own localization file and change the string to 'Preview Submission", "Preview My Answers", or whatever you want. Then you can also use that file to tweak the language wherever else you want to.

Jason

In reply to Jason Aubrey

Re: Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

by Louis Zulli -
Thanks, Jason. That's an interesting way to modify the text.

Is the information here current and complete?
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

by Dick Lane -
Hi Danny,

Which file did you revise to change the labeling of the Preview button?
In reply to Dick Lane

Re: Student confusion with "Preview Answers"

by Dick Lane -
I revised line 537 of
        webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator/Problem.pm
to use
        maketext("preview MY answer(s)")
instead of
        maketext("Preview Answers")

and then put that change into effect with
        sudo  apache2ctl  graceful


Note that the suggestion about using a localization file probably requires knowledge of the name for the relevant string.  I think that detail is in the cited line of the file I mentioned above.

A future discussion might
  0)  identify other files which affect this Preview button
  1)  find other items which benefit from similar rewording
  2)  consider whether this type of change should be part of a
    a)  style-localization
    b)  list of possibly-useful changes for a site's customization
    c)  explicit revision of base code