Case sensitivity in Fill-In-the-Blank questions in New Quizzes

[jwillin]

In the New Quizzes tool I am not seeing a way to set a Fill-In-the-Blank question to be case-insensitive. I see that as an option if  I use the 'Close Enough' option based on the Levenshtein Distance but it does not allow me to set the Levenshtein to zero and that's not what I want. 

Is case-insensitivity an option? 

Thank you,

John Willingham

[rmurchshafer · Accepted solution]

John,

Interesting.  In Classic Quizzes the answers for fill in the blank is NOT case sensitive so I assumed the same for New Quizzes.  Looking more at the guide I see what you mean.  Really about the only way I see to do it would be to use the Exact Match option and then give multiple correct answers such as "grasshopper" and "Grasshopper".  It would be a nice feature to provide and option with Exact Match to be case insensitive, similar to how there is an option for that on the close enough setting,  Or to allow a 0 Levenshtein value as you suggest.  

Rick

[PatrickCoin]

I just started using new quizzes. Thanks everyone, for this thorough discussion. My conclusion is, likewise, that I have to enter a bunch of exact matches with different initial case and then singular and plural where I don't care. I still get the occasional student who likes to type in all caps, and that won't help them.

A related point: Can one make new quizzes ignore white spaces? It does not seem to be possible. I guess one could use the Levenshtein option somehow, but there are problems with that, as others note. 

[jwillin]

I will check to see if a feature request exists for this and create one if it doesn't.

Thank you,

John

[danaleeling]

I think one could set the Levenshtein distance to one to allow for the lead letter being in the wrong case, but this would introduce the possibility of a misspelling elsewhere in the answer if the lead letter case is correct. This is a serious problem as I almost always need case insensitive answers and I don't want a Levenshtein distance of one to allow for this. I was surprised to see that there is no setting for this situation even now in 2024. A trial run of New Quizzes in my class this spring term has me running back to Classic quizzes. NQ is not yet ready for prime time. I have too many faculty who will be thrown for a loop by issues such as this one.

[JonathanEldridg]

You can also accomplish this with the "Regular Expression Match" submission option. For example, if the correct answer is "Yes" and you don't care about capitalization, but do care about spelling, type "[yY][eE][sS]" as the answer. Or, if you only want to worry about the first letter being capitalized or not, "[yY]es".

I agree, however, that this solution should be overkill, and allowing us to set the Levenshtein distance to zero and/or a case sensitive toggle for the "Exact Match" would be much more intuitive. Especially considering that typing this out becomes tedious for longer answers like "grasshopper" and longer.

The reason I suggest this here, is because the Exact Match + multiple options ends up showing students all the options in a list as feedback, and some students get confused. On a New Quiz I made, a student saw the "Correct Answer: YES, Yes, YEs, YeS, yES, yEs, yeS, yes" feedback after their first attempt and put "YES, Yes, YEs, YeS, yES, yEs, yeS, yes" into the box for their final attempt, which was marked wrong.