Hello,
In open questions it is possible to tell Moodle either to differentiate or not between "the cat" and "THE CAT". In some cases capital letters do matter. In others , they don't.
Why cannot we have the same approach vis-a-vis blanks or "spaces".
In some cases "The cat"
isjust as goo as "The cat".
(whatever the number of blanks between the expected "strings")
Does anyone else feel that way?
Thanks fo your time, patches or even workarounds.
Philippe
-I suppose you're just way ahead of your time.
-Yes probably, and talking alone too!
Which version of Moodle ? 1.9.x or 2.0 / 1 / 2?
Hi Philippe,
The attached patch against current Moodle 1.9.16+ (Build: 20120119) removes extra blank spaces from student's answer in shortanswer questions.
Hope this helps,
Joseph
Waou!
That sounds like the pot of gold when I least expected it.
Thanks Joseph.
We use the "test" activity throughout Rouen University. When this is put in place I think they'll send you a chocolate box each!
(At least I will
)
Philippe
Hello Joseph,
Our admin installed you script, but he had to make minor alterations in order for it to work in our environement.
So I am not sure the script is doing exactly what it is supposed to. Here is the behavior:
1:Correct student input with extra space(s) at the begining of the "short answer" quiz (i.e. befeore the very first letter of the answer " the cat"): extras space(s) removed and perfect scoring.
2: Correct student input with extra space(s) between strings (i.e "the cat"): extra space(s) removed but answser counted as wrong. IF STUDENT PRESSES ON "SEND" A SECOND TIME, answer is counted as correct (which looks logical, since there is then no more extra space).
Is this the intended behavior of the script, or should it remove the extra spaces wherevere they are and count the answer as correct right from the start?
Thanks
Philippe
It would be reasonable to add a 'normalise whitespace' option, or something like that, to the shortanswer question type. Nice idea.
' Possible to standardize that in Moodle 2.x?
Cheers
Hello Joseph and all Quiz activity users,
Joseph, you were kind enough to provide a fix to the extra space(s) situation disscussed in this thread.
We (Rouen univ.) have now moved to Moodle2.x.
I am quite sure our students, and many in the community, would be very grateful if you could offer us the same fix for M2.x.
In advance, many thanks to our "very useful" moodlers!
Philippe
Which version of Moodle 2 are you using?
I'll have a look at the extra whitespace removal problem.
Joseph
Here is a patch against moodle 2.5.1+ This patch implies a few lines changes in 2 files.
When a student enters a correct answer with extra blanks (1), upon checking, the blanks are removed and the answer is considered as correct (2).
@Tim, how about adding the "extra blanks removal" option to the shortanswer question edit form?
Joseph
Hello Joseph, hello Tim,
I think we should try to get this option integrated before Moodle 2.6 code freeze.
If I understand Joseph's patch correctly the student response is saved in the database unmodified, and blanks are removed on grading and display.
Do both of you think this is the best solution, or would it be better to save the normalized response in database.
Just playing devil's/usability advocate for a moment here:
Can anyone think of a reason why someone would NOT want extraneous whitespace removed?
If there aren't any examples of this then why shouldn't this just become part of what short answer questions do automatically? The questions that support units already do this.
I realize the hesitancy to change the operation of a question but I'm having a hard time coming up with a situation where this change would be a problem for someone.
I cannot think of any, and I have been thinking about this in relation to my gapfill question type. I had assumed that most gaps would be single words, but it has become clear that is not the assumption made by everyone.
Up to now I had been thinking in terms of using wildcards to address this issue, but that is overly complex.
How about the thought that students should be responsible for typing their answers correctly - we would not accept the answer if they typed an extra letter so why do we feel the need to remove extra spaces for them?
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea to remove them automatically but wanted to follow along with the devil's advocate thread!
Emma "... we would not accept the answer if they typed an extra letter so why do we feel the need to remove extra spaces for them?"
Well, these are two really different cases. In the good old days of handwritten exercises, a teacher would never have measured the blank space separating two words and counting extra large spaces as "incorrect" the same as extra letters would be counted incorrect in student's answers.
If you were using a Moodle quiz's SA questions to test a student's knowledge in typography or Web design, then the extra blank spaces might be counted "incorrect". But I doubt that that is a typical use of the Moodle quiz. In my experience, it is not infrequent that students unconsciously type 2 consecutive blank spaces (leaving their thumb too long on the space bar), do not "see" it, and wonder why their answer is counted as "incorrect" in a quiz.
So I think it would be sensible to automatically remove any extra blank spaces from the students' answers in quiz. No need to make it yet one more "option" on the already cluttered question editing screen.
Joseph
Joseph, You're a genius and and a generous one at that!
Thanks for the patch, I 'll report here if ther is any debugging to be done...
(I doubt it, it worked just fine with M1.9
I hope it does become a core part of 2.6 but... but I also hoped aliases would become part of backups
Thanks again!
Philippe
I think that we cannot just do this. There are probably technical question where whitespace matters (a question about regular expressions, someone teaching typography who things there should be exactly two spaces after a full stop, other programming language questions.)
So, I think it should be another option in the question settings. (Can we put it in the same setting as case does not matter? Probably not.)
However, I can see that it is a useful option to add.
As I said, I don't disagree that it would be a good option - I was just answering the previous question! I know a few teachers that are anal enough to expect the answer to be entered to a t.
Good points all. In particular I had obviously not considered the typography option and wasn't sure it would matter in programming questions since the little I know about it whitespace seems irrelevant many times.
Tim, is there some reason why you think it shouldn't go next to the case sensitivity?
Can we agree that extra whitespace should be removed by default? Of course any questions created prior to the upgrade should have the same characteristics as they do now...
I think a separate option next to whitespace is probably the right thing.
Of course, at the moment, we do modify some whitespace. We remove leading and trailing whitespace (which might be a problem for programming questions) but we don't normalise whitespace within the string. So, there are potentially several useful options to add.
Note that the OU's pmatch question type always normalises whitespace, without giving you the option (I think) since its matching is based on words.
Case sensitivity is somewhat different as there are many cases when you do need students to use case correctly. I know in Hot Potatoes, there was always the option whether the answer should be case sensitive or not and it would be great to see this carried across to relevant question types.
In some programming languages whitespace is very important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
(Mike Giggler)
I've always loved that one. Well played...