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lewischl / calculus_1

webwork and tools for teaching Calculus 1
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errors from copy-pasta of math into answer boxes #22

Open lewischl opened 1 year ago

lewischl commented 1 year ago

in limits_training_limits-with-formulas a handful of students are unable to move past the first real question (not the passcode) in number 2. I attached screenshots of error messages - one student told me she tried logging on with different browsers and still kept getting the error. Not everyone is getting this message so not sure why these particular students are having issues

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ofloveandhate commented 1 year ago

I believe this is the result of the student copy-pasting math from another site into Webwork -- it's not a problem with the problem. In particular, \xE2 is a minus character. These students are cheating...

Do the errors occur only when they submit, or now every time they load the problem? If it's every time they load the problem, you may have to un-assign and re-assign the problem.

There is an option in the Course Configuration to allow these symbols. Up to you whether to allow them. I disallow, and let students run into this -- they don't know it, but every one of these errors is an admission of guilt. I've never turned the option over to allow it, so I'm not sure that flipping that setting would indeed "solve" this problem.

lewischl commented 1 year ago

ahhhh I just made it appear in my webwork too by copying - in this problem there's a desmos widget embedded. so if you used the desmos grapher in the problem to find the value of the function and copied the negative number it gave you into the answer box, you'd get the error. Not every student's limit was negative so this is why is was only affecting some people

they were only getting errors when they tried to submit so I don't think i need to reassign

ofloveandhate commented 1 year ago

Maybe this is compelling reason to allow these characters... I don't think there's a way to do it per-problem. Do you have thoughts about allowing these characters globally? How important is it that the system reject (albeit opaquely and unhelpfully) copy-pasted stuff? I mean, it only rejects some copypasta.

ofloveandhate commented 1 year ago

Especially since its within problem with embedded Desmos. Enabling copypasta for that is pretty compelling to me.

lewischl commented 1 year ago

I would be okay with allowing the characters - if students are copy/pasting I'm not sure the error message is much of a deterrence. regardless, it might be good to just add a message to problems with desmos embedded that instructs students to type their answers and not copy/paste

ofloveandhate commented 1 year ago

i went ahead and enabled these characters, because i feel like copy-paste from desmos within a problem is important

ofloveandhate commented 11 months ago

Changing the course configuration to convert to ascii from non-ascii does NOT convert all minus equivalents from Desmos!!! Something needs to be changed in webwork itself to completely solve this problem.