Warning, Moodle's word count is changing

Warning, Moodle's word count is changing

by Tim Hunt -
Number of replies: 1
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

For a long time, there has been a known issue with Moodle's ability to count words: MDL-46256. That got fixed this week.

However, we then almost immediately found some more cases where Moodle gets it 'wrong'.

One might it was open to debate what the 'right' word-count is for some tricky texts (with lots of punctuation, etc.). However, it seems that all of

  • Microsoft Word
  • LibreOffice
  • Some random web-site I found on Google (https://wordcounter.net/)
  • And a custom atto plugin we use at the Open University

all give the same answer for all the examples I tried, and Moodle build in word-count gives a different answer. Therefore, I think we have to say that Moodle 'wrong' and should be brought into line.

I hope everyone agrees that is a good thing to do. I have created MDL-70796 to do it.

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Warning, Moodle's word count is changing

by Karsten Loepelmann -

Yes, this is important to fix. Many students write things in their word processing software first, and then copy it over only to find the word count is different. And then they complain about it to me, but there's nothing I can do about it.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)