Joseph Rézeau

Carlos > (I'm kissing your avatar)

James,
There are many possibilities, depending on how "tolerant" you want to be with the way your students enter their answer. Here are some examples...
Answer 1: 1, 3, 5, 15
will accept: 1, 3, 5, 15
Answer 2: (1 3 5 15|1,3,5,15|1,3,5 and 15|1, 3, 5 and 15)
will accept:
1 3 5 15
1,3,5,15
1,3,5 and 15*
1, 3, 5 and 15
Answer 3:
(one three five fifteen|one,three,five,fifteen|one,three,five and fifteen|one, three, five and fifteen)
will accept:
one three five fifteen
one,three,five,fifteen*
one,three,five and fifteen*
one, three, five and fifteen
Please note that any extraneous blank space is automatically deleted by the analysis system, which means that all of these answers will be accepted:
1 3 5 15
1 3 5 15
1, 3, 5, 15
However, the following will not be accepted (because the punctuation is not coherent)
1, 3 5, 15
one three, five and fifteen
* personally I would not accept those asterisked responses because they do not follow the punctuation rules of English
Joseph

Hi Peter,

1- The only experience I have in writing a question type plugin was the regexp question type which is basically an extension of the existing shortanswer question type. So I started from the shortanswer question type and did the necessary modifications in its various files. This is of course only possible when a new question type is fairly close to an existing one, at least to start with.

2- I am very interested in you new plugin, although I do not quite see what it might look like from the short description you give: "... a question type where the student marks themself against a model answer so that no tutor intervention is required? " Would it look more like a shortanswer type or a Multiple Choice type? I'm puzzled and would like to see some real-world examples.

Joseph

PS.- I agree with Howard that an important consideration is whether to start developing such new question type plugins for 1.8 or straight away for 1.9, considering the differences.

Hi Ralf,
I know that, but that's not the point of my request. I'd like there to be an incentive for people reporting a problem in these forums to post their moodle version.
Joseph

This message is for the Moodle "supervisors"...

As we are having more and more different versions of Moodle being used, and more and more differences between them, it would be extremely useful if there was a very visible warning message somewhere on the welcome page of these forums inviting users posting a message to systematically mention their modle version at the very start of a "problem" message.

When I try to help others, I find that much misunderstanding springs from the fact that we take for granted that the moodler asking for help is using the latest current version (1.8.2 to date) and we lose time exchanging messages until finally we find out that that moodler is using a fairly old version (1.6 or even 1.5) where that problem existed but has been corrected in more recent versions.

Thanks,

Joseph

PS.- This mention of moodle version exists in the bug tracker, of course, and from what I remember of the days when I used WebCT it was also existed in the forums, as a drop-down list located somewhere between the Subject field and the Message (text) field. That would be even better than a "warning" message which no-one reads anyway. Of course, provision should be made for "n/a" choice where the version of moodle does not matter for the problem at hand.