Exercise type: Text

Everything you need to know about the exercise type: Text

Updated over a week ago

This exercise type lets the student answer in the form of plain text. Multiple answer fields are supported, and answer fields are limited to 60 characters in length. An example with two answer fields is the following:

The number of input fields can be changed in the “General” tab of the exercise in “Edit exercise” mode. In the “Texts” tab, you can write the question, the solution, and the pre- and post input:

Note that the question text including the image is not displayed in the picture.

Feedback and defining a solution

Evaluation of this exercise (in “Solutions”, “Negative feedback” and “Positive feedback”) can be done by any of the text-based evaluation types:

1. Contains text
Checks whether the user input contains all the texts from the Definition field, not necessarily in the same order. The texts must be separated by a semicolon ';'. Variations of the same text (e.g. contractions) can also be added by placing them between square brackets '[ ]' and separating them by comma ','.
For example, if Definition: [is not,isn't];and;tree then the user input must include the texts 'and', 'tree' and one of the words 'is not' or 'isn't' in order to be considered correct.
Note that the text “a band is not the same as two trees” will also be correct because both 'and' and 'tree' are included (in the words ‘band’ and ‘trees’).

2. Contains word
Same as “Contains text”, but now “a band is not the same as two trees” will not be considered correct, because “band” is not the same word as “and”, and “trees” is not the same word as “tree”.

3. Similar text

Determine a percentage of similarity between the student's answer and the solution Definition, for example to catch spelling errors. Specify a Precision to set the tolerated percentage deviation between the student’s answer and the Definiton, e.g. Precision = 10 would mean there needs to be a 90% similarity in order to evaluate to ‘true’.

Example:

The similarity between “parabol” and “parabola” is ⅞=87,5%. The Precision is 20%, which means a similarity of 80% would suffice to activate this feedback rule:

4. Text case insensitive
Checks whether the user input is equal to the text in the Definition field with a case insensitive check.

5. Text case sensitive
Checks whether the user input is equal to the text in the Definition field with a case-sensitive check.

6. Text regex
Checks whether the user input matches the regex pattern entered in the Definition field. For more information on regex patterns, click here.

For example, if you want to write a regular expression to match a date format such as dd/mm/yyyy then you would write the following:

^(0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])[\/\-](0?[1-9]|1[012])[\/\-]\d{4}$

Note that we need to escape the forward slashes with a backslash.

Any html-tags are stripped from the student's answer, so usage of bold tags like “The answer is <strong>apple</strong>” will become “The answer is apple”.

7. Default incorrect (only in Negative feedback)
Always reacts to wrong answers and has a predefined priority of 99.

For information on how to translate an exercise that has text in the variables, see this article.

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