New Quiz Formula Question "Margin of Error" with "Display as Scientific Notation"

[MrCreasman]

I am using New Quizzes formula questions for my IB physics class.

When building a new question, within the "Generate Possible Solutions" section, it starts out with an option to set the margin of error as either "absolute" or "percent" and then specify how much error is to be allowed. This is good and what I would like to use!

However, on many of my questions, it makes sense to use the "display as scientific notation" option, because the answers will be *10^-15 or smaller. But, when I toggle to "display as scientific notation," the options for choosing margin of error go away.

Is there a way to use scientific notation AND allow for margin of error. For example, I would like to require "scientific notation" with "3 decimal places" but allow for "+/- 1" on the third place after the decimal.

So if the correct answer was: 1.234*10^5, the following three answers would be correct, and everything else would be incorrect: 

1.233*10^5

1.234*10^5

1.235*10^5

[James · Accepted solution]

@MrCreasman 

First, I try really hard not to use New Quizzes, but I went in and played around to see if I could answer your question. I'm not seeing a "Display as scientific notation" option and couldn't find it described in the documentation explaining how to create a numeric question with New Quizzes.

You can create exact answers of 1.233E-15, 1.234E-15, and 1.235E-15. Yes, you can have more than one correct answer.

When a student enters any of those, it accepts the answer, but shows 0.000000 (with varying decimal places) as their answer and the correct answer. However, if you don't enter one of those values (I tried 1.3E-15) it will count it wrong -- while still showing 0's.

With Classic Quizzes, the precise response technique is used for setting the number of significant digits or decimals, but in New Quizzes they don't support scientific notation.

Within a Range question will accept scientific notation, but you cannot force the number of decimal places like you can with exact answers. You could say anything between 1.233E-15 and 1.235E-15, but Canvas would accept 1.234335E-15.

What we had to do with questions like this with Classic Quizzes was to use text answers and then put in all of the responses the student could enter. With New Quizzes, you could do that, even using regular expressions if you like.