Wouldn't it be nice if Moodle could understand that there is no difference beween:
"Hello world!"
"Hello world !"
and
" hello world !"
In other words, if we could teach it to forego superfluous blanks, when evaluating open answers. (one blank = n blanks if n>0 & blanks before first character and punctuation are ognored)
Any idea , thread on this?
Cheers
It seems I took the precise wrong example.
Here is somehing more explanatory:
If you create a test in Moodel expecting a short answer such as:
"What does WWW stand for?"
You expect an answer such as:
"world wide web"
The problem is that some students may very well give the right answer ADDING AN EXTRA SPACE BETWEEN THE WORDS:
"world wide web"
"" world wide web"
etc...
Moodle can't tell all these answers are the same, and there is an almost endless number of "extra-space possibilities". Thus writing them out, as possible answers, is not an option, especially if you already have quite a large number of alternative answers.
This is where my proposal comes in.
It is not possible to ask the programme to understand that two spaces (or any number of consecutive spaces is the same as "one space" and that an extra space before a comma or a dot or any regular expression is the same as no space as all, and that any space before the first character in an answer phrase should be ignored?
Am I any clearer?
Has anyone read this question or is it just too difficult to come up with an answer?
Cheers