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

[Carl Lira]

I've used spreadsheets a couple of semesters because of my complicated point
scheme with different weights for written homework, exams, loncapa
exercises, etc. I create a student-level template with the formulas to use.
They are very powerful.

They work like an excel spreadsheet, so you can program formulas to
calculate the points to assign for a given problem. If you want to give
different points depending on the number of trials, you can find that
information and enter a formula.

For example, a homework problem from a previous course shows this
spreadsheet table (cells are denoted by blanks and this will run over a
couple rows of the e-mail message, but in loncapa it is one wide row):

72		Homework Problem 1. Interpolation
	 correct 	 Tries: 	 2 	 Timestamp: 	 1389119141
TueJan713:25:412014 	 Duedate: 	 1389366000
FriJan1010:00:002014 	 Attempted Parts: 	 1 	 Solved Parts: 	 1

You can see the number of tries and the solved parts. So to give partial
credit, just create a formula to use in one of the extra columns provided. I
used columns for the different categories of material, and then you can sum
the columns at the top of the sheet. You can enter formulas to include the
weights for the different categories. You must enter the formula for each
resource that you want to treat this way. I created a screencast to show
students how to read the sheet: https://connect.msu.edu/loncapa-grades/

I encountered a minor bug that occurred when I copied my course from one
semester to the next. Some cells were not completely null in the copy, and
the '&NUM', '&SUBMIN' functions were compromised, but I know Stuart Raeburn
worked on that and I have not tested subsequently. I'm not using it this
semester because I decided to use i>clickers and transferring loncapa stuff
to the MSU d2l system was less work than importing a lot of i>clicker data
into loncapa.

This is a very powerful tool. To make it more useful, it would be good if 1)
(minor issue) the header could be static so it was visible when working in
rows far from the header; 2) (major issue) the row numbers and resource
names were visible when working far to the right if in column z for example;
3) (minor issue) The table columns all lined up. Currently each folder is a
separate table so that there are many tables of different widths so the
columns don't line up through the entire course; 4) They integrated with
i>clickers used here at MSU.

Carl Lira
Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
2527 Engineering Building
428 S. Shaw Lane
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1226
Phone: (517) 355-9731
FAX: (517)432-1105
http://www.egr.msu.edu/~lira
http://chethermo.net <http://chethermo.net/> 




-----Original Message-----
From: lon-capa-users-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org
[mailto:lon-capa-users-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org] On Behalf Of Mills,
Douglas G
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 1:38 PM
To: Discussion list for LON-CAPA users
Cc: Mills, Douglas G
Subject: Re: [LON-CAPA-users] automatically decrease point value with number
of attempts

Hi All,

Thank you Peter and Mark.  Excuse the basic question on spreadsheets, but
I'm not finding this addressed anywhere. Is there only one Assessment
spreadsheet per course?  ....