Whatever it created a bit of a problem. We could hardly mark an answer wrong because of the presence of this extra text, but how could we achieve accurate answer matching in its presence? I know that some people get round this by simply telling students not to write extra text of this sort, but I didn’t want to do this. When the final answer has no units – and you are not assessing the fact that it has no units – we have found it acceptable to simply remove all text after the answer before doing the answer matching. But when you are assessing units you can’t do this – you want to check that the student has not written 3.7 miles, 3.7 mars bars or (more likely) 3.7\u00a0m s-1<\/sup>. Simply removing all text after the unit won’t work.<\/p>\n Now comes the trick. We looked at how students actually enter the text that indicates their precision. There are all permutations and combinations of\u00a0\u00a0‘to two significant figures’\u00a0, \u00a0‘(2 s.f.)’\u00a0 etc., but they always seem to\u00a0start with \u00a0the word ‘to’ or with an opening bracket ‘(‘. So we simply remove all text that starts in one of these ways. Simple, but it seems to work. The screenshots below illustrate a question with this fix in place. Compare:<\/p>\n With:<\/p>\n I know\u00a0I keep banging on about the importance of monitoring your questions when they are ‘out there’, being used by students. If what follows\u00a0appears to be\u00a0a bit of a trick (and in a sense it is), it’s a trick with … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/Capture.png\" "\\"Capture\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/Capture-12.png\" "\\"Capture")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"