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popup scoring errors?

popup scoring errors?

by Andrew Dabrowski -
Number of replies: 7

Has anyone encountered errors in recording scores on popup questions?

On a calculus exam last week, one problem had two questions with popup answers.  There seem to have been a number of mistakes in recording students' scores on that question.  For example, one student got both popup answers right, and hitting Check Test confirms that WW considered them correct; but the score on that question was recorded as 0.  I checked his past answers, and he had indeed entered the correct answers within the time limit.

Could this be a bug in how WW records the scores of popup questions?

Would it be safe to delete this question from the exam now?  Would the scores be updated to reflect the change?


In reply to Andrew Dabrowski

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Glenn Rice -

I have many questions with pop up menu answers.  I have never had any problems with them being recorded incorrectly.  Was this in a gateway quiz?  Can you attach the pg source file for one of the one of the problems where this occurred, or give the OPL location if in the OPL?

In reply to Glenn Rice

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Andrew Dabrowski -

The problem is from the OPL, LoyolaChicago/Precalc/Chap5Sec1/graph-shifting-22.pg.

It was used on a gateway quiz, in which the order of questions was randomized.

In reply to Andrew Dabrowski

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Danny Glin -
Rather than delete the question from the exam, the safer thing to do is to use the "Mark Correct" checkbox in the Homework Sets Editor. This will mark the question correct for everyone in the class.
I know gateway quizzes in general don't always behave well when a question is deleted from the middle of a set.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Alex Jordan -
Echoing Danny,

When you delete a problem from a set, you have two choices. If I were to delete #2 from a set with #1,#2,#3, I can either leave the remaining questions as #1,#3, or renumber to #1,#2.

If you leave them as #1,#3, this will break a Gateway Quiz, which needs the assigned problems to come in a regular order. (That is perhaps a design flaw that could be corrected with some investigation.)

If you change them to #1,#2, that won't change the history of each student's actions with the original #2 and #3. For example, if they had already answered #3 correct, the database says they have score 1 for #3 (but now ignores that). And now the database may still say they have score 0 for #2 because they never answered the original #2 correctly. They may need to resubmit an answer for the new #2. I may not have gotten that quite correct, but things similar to this will happen. So deleting a question and renumbering is not advised unless you are sure no students have worked on the problem set yet.

Lastly, changing something about the parent Gateway assignment might have no effect on individual versions of a Gateway problem set that has already been started. You would have to visit each particular version if you wanted to make real changes.

As Danny says, marking the question correct of everyone is a good option. (Although, do you have to do that for each version?) At the same time, you might set the weight of the question to 0 so that it doesn't artificially raise everyone's score.
In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Andrew Dabrowski -
So the best options are to set the weight for that problem to 0, or use "Mark Correct".

The exam was given already. Would making either of those changes now correct the scores of students who have already taken it, or just those of students taking it in the future?
In reply to Andrew Dabrowski

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Glenn Rice -
Mark correct will fix the problem automatically. Setting the weight to zero will not. You would then have to go into each students settings and reset the individual setting to the course default.
In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: popup scoring errors?

by Glenn Rice -

Note that the consecutive numbering issue in gateway quizzes is fixed in https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/pull/1128. Of course this will not be available until the next release. If you have admin access to the server, you could patch it in now.