[New Quizzes] Add functionality to Fill in the Blank questions.

[BradThames]

Problem statement:

Fill in the Blank questions currently have a significant limitation in that they do not easily allow questions in which the order of the answers does not matter. Suppose the question was something like, "The colors of the US flag are `red`, `white`, and `blue`" and you want students to be able to write in all three colors, but it doesn't matter which order (writing "blue", "red", and "white" would obviously be correct). One solution is, under "Text Match", to choose, "Specify Correct Answers", then include red, white, and blue as the possible correct answers. However, this is inadequate, since a student could write in "red" for all three and get it "correct", when that would be a mistake. This came up in the context of an exam where it's really important for the students to be able to write in the answers from memory, so drop-downs and word banks would not suffice. It is also a large class, and the instructor wants to use many questions of this type, so manual grading to check for things like this would be quite laborious and time-consuming and defeat the purpose of auto-grading, as would using an essay question format. (Incidentally, the instructor brought this up because she already had to manually review each exam to see if students had put in the correct answers but in the "wrong" order.) So currently there does not seem to be an option for this kind of common quiz question.

Proposed solution:

Provide a setting where the locations of the blanks are specified, the possible answers are specified, but the order of the answers is not forced. E.g., the syntax might be something like, "The colors of the US flag are `color`, `color`, and `color`" and the possible answers for "color" are "red" "white" and "blue". Then there would be a checkbox that says "allow answers to be inserted in any order" and one that says "each answer must be used once" (along with a partial credit option if, say, a student remembers 2 out of three).

User role(s):

instructor,designer

[MPioRoda]

Thank you for sharing this idea with the Instructure Community!

While we appreciate your proposal, we also want to be transparent about the likelihood of something like this making it to production. The Product Team reviewed some of our feature proposals recently and, unfortunately, this request was identified as one that they would not be able to include in their current or future plans.

Our suggestion for this proposed idea would be to make it one blank and use Regular Expression Match for the text match option. This method requires using specialized text strings that describe search patterns and take some time to learn. If you are familiar with Regular Expression or want to take the time to learn more about it, you can see the section in the Instructor Guide which introduces how it can be use for FITB questions in new Quizzes and provides a link to RegEx in Wikipedia. 

One of our engineers wrote this expression for your specific example:

(?i)(?=.*red)(?=.*white)(?=.*blue)^(?:red|white|blue|,| )+$

This expression basically says the text must contain the words “red” and “white” and “blue” and cannot contain anything else (except commas and spaces). You should be able to replace red/white/blue with whatever terms you want.

Thank you for collaborating, and we hope that you submit another idea in the future!