** Using WeBWorK **

I would like to give students the "check answers" button in WebWork (like the button that the instructor has, before the assignment is closed).

I think that would be a mistake, and it would cause its own problems. This would tell students whether their answers are right or not before they submit them, and some students may fail to get credit for the problem because they checked it (and were told they were right) but didn't SUBMIT it. You're going to cause yourself a different kind of headache by doing this.

(The alternative would be to stop assigning multi-part questions, for which the quality of the feedback is poor - it does not indicate specifically which parts are incorrect.)

Most multi-part problems DO provide feedback on which parts are correct or incorrect. The problem file itself can control whether this is the case or not, however, and some problems do NOT tell which parts are correct, usually for good reason. For example, in a multiple TRUE/FALSE problem, if each part were marked correct or not, the student would essentially be given the answer. No understanding would be required, simply submit TRUE for everything and WeBWorK would tell you which ones should be FALSE. That usually is NOT the desired behavior.

Similarly, for a matching problem, you don't usually tell which parts are correct, because it is then easy to guess the right answers (simply put A for all answers, and it will tell you which one is right, then put B for the others, and so on).

This is why those types of problems don't provide additional feedback. I think it would be a mistake to override this behavior on a global scale.

If you have specific problems that you think should show the correct/incorrect indicators, but don't, then you can make a local copy of the problem and edit it. Set $showPartialCorrectAnswers = 1; within the problem. I think the default is 0, so it maybe that you are using badly designed problems that have not set this value when they should.

I found that students can get this button at "perm. level" 5

Permission level 5 is the TA level. You do NOT want to set students to this level, in general.

WeBWorK's permission system assigns each user a permission level, and each task a minimum required level. If you change a person's permission level, you change their ability to access ALL tasks, and by going to level 5, you will have authorized the students to do many actions you don't want (as you found out).

What you want to do is LOWER the minimum permission needed to see the "check" button. That would affect only that one action, You can see the various actions in the %permissionLevels hash in the global.conf configuration file. I think the one you want is check_answers_after_open_date_with_attempts.

The Course Configuration instructor tool allows you to set some permission levels, but unfortunately this isn't one of them. So to change this on a course-by-course basis, you would need to edit the course.conf file and add

   $permissionLevels{check_answers_after_open_date_with_attempts} = "student";

Davide