I’ve had students report a couple of weird things that I either can’t reproduce reliably or can’t isolate a cause for. I haven’t reported them thus far because I haven’t been able to nail down any specifics and that’s not very useful, but I wanted you to have the info anyway.
With some fairly complicated derivative problems involving multiple derivative rules together, some students hit the check button and doenet was taking several seconds, or even a minute or more, to return either correct or incorrect. But not all students and not on every problem.
Secondly, with some of these complicated derivatives, including some implicit differentiation, I’m also getting some students marked incorrect when what they type looks correct to me (and them). At least two or three times now for different students and different problems, if I just erase everything they had and type it back in for them, then what I typed in their problem will be marked correct. I assume that the way my students are using parentheses or not, inserting an explicit times or not, hitting space or not, means that their answer is actually sneakily wrong, but it’s hard to identify from the mathquill rendered answer box. Having some sort of “Preview what I’ve entered” option, even if only when their answer is incorrect, or if an author could opt in to show that as an automatic feedback, would be useful in these cases (and also to identify misplaced parentheses).
Interestingly, one student told me ChatGPT was somewhat helpful in identifying what the difference was between a student’s answer they thought was correct and what ChatGPT said the correct answer was. It couldn’t tell them what caused the mistake (they hadn’t distributed a minus sign through the product rule and had instead only applied it to the first term), but it did identify the missed negative sign in one term as the error.
Chrissy