I’m working w/ a faculty on creating a homework system complete with quiz questions. We doing it in WordPress/Pressbooks (yet to be finalized which, but matters not here).
For most of the questions/exercises we will be using are H5P’s using the WP H5P plugin. But H5P has a common limitation on math-oriented quiz questions. H5P apparently only recognizes text-based strings as answers. It doesn’t not evaluate numbers as numbers.
Example: Q: what is 100 divided by 3?
Acceptable answers must be defined as text strings: i.e. 33 is Ok, 33.3 is ok, 33.33 is ok. but 33.333 would be rejected despite it being valid.
Moodle handles this stuff well, but that’s embedded in a whole LMS.
anybody know of any quiz plugins or WP-based course like LearnDash that might handle math quiz questions?
I wonder if you couldn’t just sanitize the input so that any thing entered would be truncated/expanded to two decimal places or whatever. Which content type are you using in H5P? It could be it’s more complex than that particular example.
It seems you want a free entry of sorts rather than multiple choice so that eliminates the built in quiz options in Gravity Forms. You could write custom stuff there but it’d probably be a pain.
I think knowing just how complex you’d like things to get would be the key to recommending a path. If it’s making two things numbers instead of strings, that seems more approachable than trying to deal with latex or whatever.
I’d be curious about anything you discover as well. However, bionicteaching’s query about needed complexity is important. For simplistic answers like the one you mentioned above, field level formatting would be an entirely reasonable approach for such things (truncation of leading and trailing spaces, zero padding, repetition of single digits, non-numeric/symbolic symbols, etc.). There is also the, perhaps somewhat harsh, view of following instructions. If the instructions say your answer is to two decimal places, then zero, one or three decimals places would be incorrect. I’m not a teacher by profession so cannot comment on the value of that approach, only that I have seen it often enough, both with current technology and pre-technology grading.
Secondly, it is also appropriate in any test/grading system for the teacher to have the ability to override results. Again, depending on how complex your answer matching needs are, you might gain more value out of insuring this feature exists, possibly coupled with a way for students to “challenge” results as part of the submit/return process. This would not only deal with vague but acceptable answers but with outright mistakes also, which trap the teacher as much as the students. I have in fact seen many examples of electronic test question data bases with incorrect answers or questions so vague they border on senseless. It is good for teachers to have the ability to either override the marking or throw the question out.
Finally, from the way-out-department, I’ve always felt “showing your work” was more important than the final answer, especially in Mathematics. Having a way for students to scan and submit their worksheets as part of a quiz would help insure understanding, vs. just accuracy (or lucky guessing). But that’s just me being ornery…