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moodler-exams

Answer boxes in R-exams

Is it possible to control the lengths of answer boxes in the Moodle from R-exams? The image below shows that the boxes have different lengths which probably correspond to those of the hidden answers. My answers contain a mixture of numeric and string answers. The boxes for the string answers appear to be smaller than those of numeric answers. I would like to standardise these boxes and make them all have equal lengths. Thank you!

enter image description here

Solution

  • Short answer:

    Good question! Yes, it is possible. You can set an extra metainformation tag numwidth to TRUE. Then the width of the cells is adjusted to the same width. So in R/Markdown exercises you just add

    exextra[numwidth,logical]: TRUE

    And in R/LaTeX exercises:

    \exextra[numwidth,logical]{TRUE}

    A worked example is provided at: http://www.R-exams.org/templates/fourfold2/.

    Details:

    This used to be an undocumented feature for numeric sub-items in cloze exercises but has been documented in R/exams 2.4-0. The analogous stringwidth specification was also added.

    In addition to the logical specification you can also use a numeric value for the maximum width (e.g., exextra[numwidth,numeric]: 8) or a number in a character value that has the desired width (e.g., exextra[numwidth,character]: 99999999).

    Example:

    A simple demo R/Markdown exercise using a numeric width specification with a mix of numeric and string questions is:

    Question
========

List the first or first six numbers and letters, respectively.

|         | Numbers     | Letters     |
|:--------|:------------|:------------|
| First   | ##ANSWER1## | ##ANSWER3## |
| First 6 | ##ANSWER2## | ##ANSWER4## |

Answerlist
----------
* 
* 
* 
* 

Meta-information
================
exname: fixedwidth
extype: cloze
exclozetype: num|num|string|string
exsolution: 1|123456|A|ABCDEF
exextra[numwidth,numeric]: 9
exextra[stringwidth,numeric]: 9

    Importing the XML output from exams2moodle("fixedwidth.Rmd") into Moodle yields blank cells with equal width:

    fixedwidth-blank

    Only when providing feedback after filling in the responses, Moodle still renders the cells somewhat differently. But I think that this cannot be controlled through modifications in the Moodle XML code.

    fixedwidth-feedback