"extra-blank-spaces" handling (the return)

"extra-blank-spaces" handling (the return)

by Philippe Decloitre -
Number of replies: 4

Hello everyone,


I am now using Moodle 2.n full swing (as our university  has made it compulsory).

I used to make use of a wonderful snipet of code provided by Joseph Rézeau that allowed the quiz's handling of short answers to be intelligent (or much more so than it is right out of the box) by allowing Moodle to consider that two (or more) consecutive blank spaces are identical to one.

Thus "the cat" is considered the same as "the        cat"



Besides _icing on the cake_ Joseph's work allowed to do the same with extra spaces before punctuation so that 1(bellow) was equal to2/

1/"the sun is shining ."

2/"the sun is shining."


But that was then, and now I'm back to the standard behaviour.

I have read that some thought of implementing Joseph's snipet in Moodle 2.n.

Is this idea still on?


Many thanks for all the intelligence put in Moodle.  smile

Cheerio

Philippe


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In reply to Philippe Decloitre

Re: "extra-blank-spaces" handling (the return)

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

If you are interested in more intelligent text-matching, then it may be worth your while looking at our pattern-match question type: https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=qtype_pmatch

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: "extra-blank-spaces" handling (the return)

by Philippe Decloitre -

Hi Tim,

I went and was very much impressed!

I don't know if I can use this plugin. I'd have to check how much time it takes to create a question such as the one about water density. I tried to answer with "weight", but could not fool the quiz. I also tried to make as many punctuation and blanks misktake as was reasonable, still it got the point when I mentionned "density"!

However on the moodle I have to work with in my university, the administrator will not even consider adding plugins.

So, it would be on a personal Moodle...

That leaves me with my question whether extra blanks are about to be discounted or not (it could be an option in the general Quiz settings, and would problably not bother anyone. Besides, it exists! Joseph's made it.  The code is just seating there, waiting to be useful...smile

Cheerio..



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In reply to Philippe Decloitre

Re: "extra-blank-spaces" handling (the return)

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I am not against improving the standard shortanswer question type. The question is, do we even need ot make it optional? What hard would it do if we always simplified whitespace in the response before grading? Would that cause problems for anyone in this forum?

At any rate, it would be useful to have it as an option. If you want to move that forwards, you need to create a Feature request in the Moodle issue tracker. See https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Tracker_introduction

Regarding pattern-match, the oil and water is a particularly clever example question. You don't have to be that ambitious at first. You can just use it as a slighly more intellegient shortanswer question type. There is traning material here: http://www.open.edu/openlearnworks/course/view.php?id=1643 but that course has strict conditional acitvities, so you have to work through the topics in order. wink

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: "extra-blank-spaces" handling (the return)

by Philippe Decloitre -

Thanks Tim!

I will look into both (tracking and training).

And I also thank all those on this forum who _by not saying anything against it _ aproved the proposal wink


Cheers to all

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