LON-CAPA Help

How to deal with multi-part problems

Often, there are several parts in a specific problem. For example, a problem with three parts may have parts 0, 11, 12, and 13, where part 0, is the part ID reserved for the problem as a whole. For a general spreadsheet, it is often desirable to sum up all of these parts, while not knowing how many parts there are as the spreadsheet is written.

The spreadsheet has a preprocessor which can expand a symbolic expression over all symbolic names that match. The general syntax is [&EXPANDSUM(VARNAME;expression)].

For example, for the above assessment with three parts,

&EXPANDSUM(PART;parameter_PART_weight*stores_PART_awarded)

would become

parameter_0_weight*stores_0_awarded + 
parameter_11_weight*stores_11_awarded + 
parameter_12_weight*stores_12_awarded + 
parameter_13_weight*stores_13_awarded + 
where bolded text is used to highlight (PDF version of manual excluded) what the &EXPANDSUM function is doing.

What 'tries' means

In multi-part questions, the exported value for "tries" is the average number of tries to get the parts correct. The full data for each part is still stored by the system. To assign partial credit based on number of tries, see the example in Special Functions ().