Apostrophe Differences

[bratsj58]

Some of my ESL students experience an issue that I believe has to do with a difference in the apostrophe they have on their keyboards (or cellphones?). It happens on self-correcting quizzes. At first I thought the students were leaving an extra space in the middle of their contractions, but after several weeks of coaching them to be careful, we still had the problem.

A Canvas coach, "chofer," was able to identify the difference. If you look very closely on the attached screenshot, you can see that "wrong" answers have curly apostrophes, and the "correct" answers have straight apostrophes.

I think this is ridiculous that Canvas can't allow for a slight deviation like this. This is apparently the only apostrophe available to these students, and any time they fill in a blank with a contraction, it's counted as wrong. Can we do anything about this?

[Stef_retired]

@bratsj58 

Thanks for sharing this idea. The screenshot shows that this is an issue in Classic (Old) Quizzes. This has been addressed in the design of New Quizzes, where quiz creators can account for this by using the more granular options described in How do I create a Fill in the Blank question in Ne... - Canvas Community . Rather than selecting Exact Match (which is the default in Classic Quizzes), the quiz creator can use Close Enough and set the appropriate Levenshtein distance for the response.

Our product teams are no longer developing new functionality on the code base for Old (Classic) Quizzes, which is scheduled to be deprecated next year, so we've archived this idea.

That said, even though this won't move forward as an idea, I hope you'll bring it to the attention of Canvas Support if you haven't already submitted a case for it. I fully agree that students shouldn't be penalized for entering a correct answer that is marked incorrect wholly due to the differences between how different devices and keyboards render an apostrophe's style.

Thanks!

[SusanNiemeyer]

I'm glad to see that this issue is being dealt with in New Quizzes. My district has only enabled Classic Quizzes, and as an ESL teacher, I have to go back and reread all of my students' work. Oh well..... it is what it is.