Past Answers

Its been a while since I've written something here, so I thought I would make a short post about a WeBWorK page which has always surprised me because of how much it is used.  I am talking about the Answer Log page.  After the jump I'll show off some improvements we have made to the Answer Log which will be arriving in the upcoming 2.8 release.

Instructors have always been able to get to the answer log page by following the "Show Past Answers" link at the bottom of any problem page.  Something which is less well known is that instructors can make it so that students can also see past answers.  This is done by setting "Allowed to view past answers" to "student" on the Permissions section of the Course Configuration page.    When instructors view the past answers page it will now look something like this:

The form at the top is to allow instructors to view answers for any student and any homework set.  The problems are colored according to correctness and now they are also formatted using the AsciiMath functionality of MathJax.  This should improve the readability of the past answers page.  It's important to note that when students look at the page they will not have the ability to view other students answers, and the answers will not be colored by correctness.  Another couple of readability features (in math4 at least) are the striped table rows (since the past answer rows can get very wide) and the extra bold bars which separate answers whose difference in submission times is greater than the WeBWorK timeout time.  The page also looks reasonably good when mixed with essay answers:

The one caveat is that if students are "creative" in how they typeset their mathematics in essay answers, MathJax may not render things correctly.

The final new feature, which will only be helpful to instructors, is that the answer log form now supports a variety of regular expressions:

For the User and Set field you may use the following:

• * - this wildcard can stand for any number of characters.
• ? - this wildcard can stand for one character. 
• | - this is an or statement.  Its mostly useful for comparing the answers of two students. 

For the problem field you can use comma separated lists of numbers or number ranges.  Be warned, doing a very broad search (like User: * and Set: * and Problem: 1-1000) can return a great many past answer entries.