Contractions in Quizzes

bratsj58
Community Participant

Is anyone else having trouble with self-correcting quizzes that count some students' answers that contain a contraction wrong? This is in my Advanced ESL class, and at first I thought that some of the students were leaving an extra space when they typed "hadn't" (hadn 't) or "wouldn't" (wouldn'  t), for example. However, after cautioning them and demonstrating in Zoom meetings how to type the contractions correctly without spaces, I still have two or three of my best students who have their contractions counted as incorrect, while the rest have no problem. I have a suspicion that it has to do with their keyboards or that perhaps they are using their phones to do the schoolwork, but they swear to me that they are leaving no spaces, and I believe them. I've tried taking the quizzes and leaving an extra space in the contractions, and I get counted wrong, too; but the crazy thing is that in the corrected quiz, Canvas makes no distinction between the "wrong" answer and the "correct" answer. It just says:

"You answered > wasn't"

"Correct answer> wasn't."

No space in either of them. This has been a real frustration for me and the few students who experience this weekly. I've even tried to get around contractions as answers because of it. Anyone have any ideas?

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