[LON-CAPA-users] automatically decrease point value with number of attempts

Lucas, Mark lucasm at ohio.edu
Tue Feb 3 14:43:27 EST 2015


I do not claim any expertise in this, but I think some people have mentioned the spreadsheet
capability as a way to do this.

Mark

On Feb 3, 2015, at 1:54 PM, Mills, Douglas G <dmills at illinois.edu> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I'm guessing there's probably a better way of doing this and someone on this list has probably done it.  Some of the instructors I work with would like to give, say, 5 attempts on a homework or quiz question but with decreased point value for each subsequent attempt, along the lines of 1point if you get it right the first try,  .8 points if correct on the second try,  .6 points on the third try, etc.
> 
> Early one I tried the weight parameter with a variable for the value of it that changed with the number of tries. That worked beautifully… in the problem itself, but in the context of the assessment progress chart and other places in Lon-Capa, the variable was not evaluated so the weight turned out to be 0.
> 
> Using "assigned_score" works well for this, but _as I understand it_ requires use of the custom problem type. I've done a lot of these and appreciate their power and versatility, but they have their downsides, perhaps for me the most significant being the need to write code to evaluate significant figures and tolerance, which are done so well for me in numerical response problems.
> 
> The approach used by some of the instructors I work with who do their own coding is to give the students access to the same quiz 3 times and then using the timestamps to determine which was the first attempt, the second attempt and the third attempt and plug those into excel to generate the best score with the second attempt worth .8 of the full points possible and the third attempt worth .6.  They have to look at timestamps because of course the clever and slightly unscrupulous students in the courses do these in reverse order to use the lower-value quizzes to practice for the full-value quiz.  I proposed using sequences to prevent access to the lower value quizzes until each of the subsequent quizzes has been attempted, but that has not caught on.
> 
> So, is there a way, within one quiz, to allow multiple attempts at each question and automatically decrease the point value of that question for each attempt besides using "assign_score" (or is there a way to get tolerance and sig fig functionality into a customresponse without coding it yourself?)
> 
> Or some other way to approach this that I'm missing?
> 
> Thanks as always!
> 
> Doug
> 
> Douglas Mills
> Director of Instructional Technologies
> Department of Chemistry
> University of Illinois
> dmills at illinois.edu
> (217) 244-5739
> 
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> LON-CAPA-users at mail.lon-capa.org
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-- 
Mark Lucas 								email: lucasm at ohiou.edu
252D Clippinger Lab						phone: (740)597-2984
Department of Physics and Astronomy		fax: (740)593-0433
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701



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