[ARCHIVED] Quiz Spelling and Case Sensitivity

[dsedia]

I understand that Canvas is very sensitive when it comes to student "fill in the blank" responses. This year I am having to address more issues with quizzes than previous years. I am reinforcing the habit with my students to check spelling and rules of capitalization and punctuation. What are the specific rules that Canvas runs off of with fill in the blank answers? I ask this because my students do not capitalize an answer and they get the item correct even if the correct answer is capitalized. However, today several students input their answers correctly and canvas marked them wrong and automatically lower cased the answer. This was my entire class of students that had this issue. 

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi Dorothy,

According to the documentation, "Currently, fill-in-the-blank answers are not case sensitive. The only way a student will get the answer incorrect is if it is left blank or the answer is misspelled. You can click Add Another Answer to add as many different versions of the correct answer as possible if you desire."

How do I create a Fill-in-the-Blank quiz question? 

Mike

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi Dorothy,

According to the documentation, "Currently, fill-in-the-blank answers are not case sensitive. The only way a student will get the answer incorrect is if it is left blank or the answer is misspelled. You can click Add Another Answer to add as many different versions of the correct answer as possible if you desire."

How do I create a Fill-in-the-Blank quiz question? 

Mike

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello  @dsedia ...

With the new Quizzes.Next quizzing engine that has been released recently, fill-in-the-blank question types now have some additional options, including case-sensitive answers.  Check out this documentation: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-15069-4152780601  You might want to check with your school's local Canvas administrator to see if they have considered using the new Quizzes.Next quizzing engine.  Hope this helps!

[sandman]

Yes, the case-sensitive aspect of the New Quizzes is really annoying.  Does anyone count an answer wrong because of a capitalization issue, especially in the age of email, texts and tweets?  The "close enough" algorithm is a bit confusing.  I'd like to see a simple box in the exact answer selection that says "ignore case" so I don't need to complicate the issue.  

[sandman]

Also...what does this mean?  This needs to be clarified in your tutorial as I do not know what is meant by "regular expressions."

• Specify Correct Answers [4]: Specifies that each acceptable response use regular expressions for a custom match.

[kjohn113]

@sandman 

Regular expressions are an easy way to program several response variations that are acceptable as correct without having to program them all in separately.  It worked very nicely in Blackboard under the "pattern match" option but I have been unable to make it work in Canvas quizzes or in quizzes.next.  It's been a few years since we switched to Canvas so I don't remember everything I used to do with pattern match, but one thing I used it for was to account for common misspellings, so by including [ab] in my string where the misspelling often occurs, the acceptable responses could contain either "a" or "b" in that position in the string and still be correct.  For example, a common misspelling pattern among Spanish speakers is to confuse the letters "b" and "v" because they sound the same. Let's say I'm more concerned about just getting the verb right rather than spelling for this item.  If my correct answer is, say, habló, meaning "he/she spoke", I could write ha[bv]ló as my correct answers and it would accept habló as well as the incorrect havló.  That's just one example.  I found it very useful in Blackboard.

[nwilson7]

@sandman Not sure this addresses your concerns 100% but if you choose "Close Enough" in the new quiz engine, there is an option to ignore case as just a checkbox like you are requesting.  There are times where case does matter, for example our world language faculty count it as it is not always just for proper nouns.  

"Regular Expressions" is a programing term for how to specify a search pattern.  I agree, not everyone will know that.