RE: [Aimmath-developers] Multipart questions ... a little trap

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Gustav W Delius wrote:
GG> Initially, I thought that perhaps some extra code should be included to
GG> prevent a student from answering later parts if the former parts were
GG> not already answered, but I think there are plenty of cases where it
GG> makes sense for students to answer the parts in any order ... so the
GG> quiz coder just needs to be aware of the potential problem and write
GG> questions accordingly.
> 
> I am strongly in favour of imposing the requirement on the student to answer
> the parts of a multi-part question in the correct order. I would be happy to
> have this requirement on all multi-part questions. I do not quite see the
> need for multi-part questions that can be answered in any order. Even in
> those cases where it would make sense to answer them in any order, what is
> wrong with following the given order? So I think the AiM code should be
> changed. Writing AiM questions is complicated enough as it is, having to put
> in extra checks into the question code is not desirable.
> 
> What do others think?

One of the advantages one now has is that a student, not knowing the 
answer to a part, can skip onto the next part. In many of my multipart
I don't need to use av>, and so the parts are essentially independent.
I would not want to force a student to enter a nonsense answer just so 
they can get onto the next part.

However, what would be nice if it could be simply coded is a depends>
tag to complement the av> tag, that would prevent a student answering
a question part if another part's answer needed to be provided first. 
This would essentially do what I had done manually, i.e. have something
like:

sq>
av> p1
s> [ ... ]
esq>
sq>
depends> p1
av>
s> [ proc(ans) if ans > p1 ... ]
esq>

  Regards,
  Greg