Formula Questions: Scientific Notation & Margin of Error

J_Ratliff
Community Explorer

What I want:  A formula question with an answer in scientific notation that allows for a small margin of error in acceptable student responses.

When I create a formula question, there is an option to allow for a small margin of error in acceptable student responses (screenshot:  https://i.imgur.com/Z2blmMs.png ).  I like to set this to 2% so that students who have rounded somewhere in their calculation but have otherwise completed the problem correctly are still marked correct.  That is, if the correct answer is "52.5" but the student enters "52.4", it's still marked correct.

But when I enable the "scientific notation" option, the margin of error option disappears (screenshot:  https://i.imgur.com/JgWpVFs.png ).  So if the correct answer is "2.81*10^7" but the student enters "2.80*10^7", it's marked wrong because it's not exactly what Canvas is expecting.  In this case, I have to manually adjust the student's score on the question, which gets tedious fast for multiple questions and multiple students.

Why does the margin of error option disappear?  Can we get it to not disappear?  Is there a more elegant way of handling this than manually adjusting student scores on each question?