[New Quizzes] New Quizzes: Multiple Answers in a Formula Question

[jeb5123]

This idea is based on extending the Formula Question type to allow for multiple answers to be entered by students.

Currently, the Formula question type is fine for simple calculated answer questions that only ask for one final response from students. We have several instructors that would like to generate data based on ranges, but also to ask for several answers based on that generated data.

One example of this would be a financial statement or budget sheet. Instructors and Designers would like to generate random data elements for some parts of these sheets, but ask for multiple answers from the same set of generated data such as the following list of questions:

"What is the Inventory Turnover? What is the AR Turnover? What is the AP Turnover? What is the Inventory Period? What is the AR Period? What is the Operating Cycle? What is the Cash Cycle? What is Net Working Capital for 2013?"

Each answer is based on the same data, but uses different formulas to determine the correct result.

[goodman]

Don't hold your breath. Over 4 1/2 years since this topic was started, and it doesn't seem like any work is being done on it. They clearly don't want to do it.

[ernest_goh]

Good news! Wiley (the publisher) has done it! This term, I adopted the book Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics. The e-text and online resources are based on Canvas. All the text book questions, obviously with many of them multiple part, are available online in a Canvas user interface. Past edition questions and practice questions as well. All this in a package cheaper than the print edition. For the icing on the cake, there are animated and narrated media to explain examples in the book and video tutorials of representative problems. Now there is no point in using a pirated PDF. I suggest that you speak to your Wiley sales rep for a demo of a book in your field.

Good thing that Canvas itself doesn't offer the feature, so now I have an excuse not to create my own questions! I am compelled to ask students buy the book.

[ronlembke]

The more I work with Canvas, the more I realize how poorly it suits the needs of any quantitative course.

[ericvandernoot]

The closest that I have been ever able to come to make this work is to use fill-in-multiple-blanks with fixed input numbers for the question and to max out the number of ways that the “answers” could be entered in as character strings (numbers with thousands separating commas or without, in different ways to enter the number in as scientific notation, with or without units of measures, … It is all VERY annoying!). In my “Test Preps” (which I use as homework like assignments) I only create a few of these to show how to do a multi-step problem. But to do this for an exam problem, I create an entire question bank of about 6 to 8 of just these question types basically asking the same question, just using different input numbers for each problem. When I tell Canvas to build the exam, I include the bank, but direct it to randomly select just one question from the bank so that each students’ exam is randomized.

Later after the exam, when working the Student Analysis downloads, I rearrange the columns of those questions to group them together, then add another column to compute the overall averages for that bank for the class. It would be nice if the Student Analysis downloads would include the questions titles that we label them when editing the questions. But I have learned that they would require us to “submit this as a proposed enhancement”, that would require a “community discussion”, and then a “community vote”, and THEN they might get around to making this small change occur. All of which just seems to me to be a massive delaying tactic on their part.

For example, it took almost all of last year, for them to fix a ticket I opened up about their feedback boxes, the “Correct Answer”, “Incorrect Answer” and “General Answer” boxes at the end of a problem, were not keeping all the text formatting functions that their message boxes menus provided. Creating a table in one of those boxes would disappear to be replaced with just all the table’s data compressed together as a sequence of numbers after refreshing the question bank. The table’s formatting would be gone. Just recently I have found that they finally fixed all of that, but to this day, have yet to email me back to say that they have fixed it. As far as I can tell, this ticket is still open.

[ronlembke]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I ended up manually creating 5 versions of each problem.

This also allowed me to get around my other complaint, which is that you can’t use a text entry box with Formula Questions.

I like to give my students the opportunity to tell me something about how they arrived at their answer, so I have some basis for awarding partial credit.

Thanks

Ron

[healthypetvet]

We need it for medical questions.  It would be nice to put in a variable weight and dose and then ask multiple formula questions for actual amount administered in mg and ml, fluid rates and then IV drip rates.  Also nutritional calculation questions feed off each other.  This shouldn't be a difficult thing to implement......

[maria_cullinane]

This is such a necessary requirement in Engineering. Multiple answers or fill in the blanks does not work because you cannot generate multiple versions of the same question with those types of questions.

If I type all the formulae into Canvas it will only output the final answer. So currently, to mark the various intermittent answers, I delete the other lines of the formulae to get the required answer.

It should be possible to pull answers from the formulae, so if the formulae were like below for example, you should be able to identify you want answers a, b and the final answer – or whatever combination.

 x=(F/(pi()*(d/1000)^2/4))

y=F/((s/1000)^2)

• a=(x/(180*10^9))*(l/1000)
• b=(y/(180*10^9))*(w/1000)
• ((a+a+b)*1000)+l+l+w

The most frustrating thing is this idea was created in 2015 and its still not done!

[ericvandernoot]

I like your idea of the additional text entry box for the explanations.  I may have to consider that myself.

[ericvandernoot]

Well I do "solve" this by using many fill-in-multiple-blank versions of the same question with fixed but different initial data.  I put all of the versions into a single question bank and when making the quiz, I tell Canvas to include the bank but to randomly select just one question out of the bank for each student's quiz.  The quizzes will be randomized, be harder to copy off of with more and more versions of the question in your bank, and allows me to require not just numbers but units of measure as well in my answers.  (Which Canvas still doesn't do either.)  This is the only way that I can do this on Canvas.  And since this feature request started almost 5 years ago, we can't just wait them out as we all have classes here, now, today.

For the fill-in answers, I max out the number of ways that an “answer” could be entered in as character strings (numbers with thousands separating commas or without, in different ways to enter the number in as scientific notation, carried out to so many significant figures, with or without units of measures, …  It is all VERY annoying and certainly not elegant, though!).  In my “Test Preps” (which I use as homework like assignments) I only create a few of these to show how to do a multi-step problem.  But to do this for an exam problem, I create an entire question bank of about 6 to 8 of just these question types basically asking the same question, just using different input numbers for each problem.

[cindyk]

I may be off-base but I think this is now doable with the new Stimulus type question in New Quizzes.  The data set is the stimulus and you can attach formula questions to it.  I do not know if there is a limit to how many questions can be attached to the stimulus but I have attached 3 successfully.  For me, I use it more to identify critical points of a graph or identify angle relationships with transversal lines instead of using formula questions but the point is asking multiple independent questions using the same data.