Is it impossible to add/remove problems from homework assignments
already assigned to students without issues?
cs
Bad idea to add/remove problems from assigned homeworks?
by Christian Seberino - Number of replies: 5
In reply to Christian Seberino
Re: Bad idea to add/remove problems from assigned homeworks?
by Arnold Pizer -
Yes, it is a bad idea to remove problems from an active assignment. Instead, use "Mark Correct" to give all students full credit for the problem. This makes students happy and basically accomplishes the same thing as removing the problem. See the discussion at
http://webwork.maa.org/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=191
Arnie
In reply to Arnold Pizer
Re: Bad idea to add/remove problems from assigned homeworks?
by Christian Seberino -Is adding and renaming problems as "dangerous" as deleting problems from
active assignments? Any way to make that work?
cs
In reply to Christian Seberino
Re: Bad idea to add/remove problems from assigned homeworks?
by Arnold Pizer -
Hi,
Without thinking about it too much, I think adding problems to the end of an assignment (so that none of the original problems are renumbered) should be OK. But this is something I have never done so I can not say for sure that it will not cause problems. Maybe others who have actually tried this will comment.
Arnie
In reply to Arnold Pizer
Re: Bad idea to add/remove problems from assigned homeworks?
by Paul Seeburger -
I've added new problems to active sets on several occasions, and I've never seen any problems arise.
I have often edited problems, sometimes adding new steps as well. The only issue this sometimes has is that the student's previous answers may show up in different answer blanks. They of course do not ever lose any credit they have already earned for the problem.
Once, I believe I may have replaced a problem with a new one (by changing the location for the problem file), and I don't remember having any trouble, but I'd have to experiment to verify this.
Paul
In reply to Paul Seeburger
Re: Bad idea to add/remove problems from assigned homeworks?
by Michael Gage -
I expect all of the changes that Paul Seeburger mentions to work smoothly except that, if you replace a problem with a new one and then look at the student grades you will not be able to tell whether the student did the assigned problem before the substitution or afterwards.
When I have done that it has been because the first version didn't work or was way to hard so it anyone who got credit is likely to have done the second version.
You can even delete problems AS LONG AS YOU DO NOT RENUMBER THEM. The difficulty is that the problem number is an part of the primary key for determining the students grade on the problem. (A flaw in our original database design 15 years ago.). That means that if you delete and renumber you will have no idea whether problem5 grades refer to the original problem 5 or the problem 5 after the renumbering. In principle you could delete the last problem without any confusion.
Arnie's solution about marking everyone's problem correct seems much superior to me and is the one that I use most often.
I often correct problems on the fly. But if the correction involves too many changes (adding new random variables or changing the order in which they are created for example) then the random number generator will generate different values for the new version of the problem. That's usually not a big deal as Paul points out.