@Virginia_Mae requested that we change the default assignment settings so “Individualize by student” is set to true by default. This would mean that, by default, each student would a different variant of an assignment (e.g., different values of randomized parameters).
Are there any objections to changing this default? Is it OK to change this default in the middle of a term?
It might just be my bias from the WebWork world, but that would the default expected behavior for me. I’d defer to others about whether to wait for the change, since it could alter their assignments.
I waited a week for objections. I guess that is long enough!
Did we talk about this in the meeting last week. My preference is for different versions. If students are side-by-side, they can just copy answers. I think Virginia advised not to change in the middle of the semester.
Does it make a difference that the semester started with this setting defaulting to “false” and then just recently changed to “true”?
It doesn’t affect me because I’m not using the doenet platform currently, but since the doenet default was always false for years until recently, I would expect that most users didn’t have any expectation that it would default to “true” suddenly.
More likely that they didn’t even realize that checkbox was even there.
So, in short, my vote would be for “change it back”
As far as I can tell, the default on beta.doenet.org has been to keep all the variants the same for students. I can’t find anything indicating a recent change.
We did recently make the change in the code so that, by default, student will get different variants. Unless we revert, those changes should live when we next deploy next week. (So weigh in whether or not that was a bad idea by early next week.)
The default only matters for newly created activities (as that is when the default is looked up). Any activities created before the change would still have the old default.