solutionSymbolic

1. In the Item Editor, under Answer Instructions, click the add box and select solutionSymbolic.

For new items, the solutionMultipleChoiceRadio answer box displays in Part A by default. To change this or any other answer type, right-click in the box and select Remove > answer type to see the add box.

2. Enter information in the answer box, as described below.

Note: By default, solutionSymbolic answers are numeric. To create an answer that is symbolic for equations, select solutionSymbolic in the entity window and set symbolicOnly to 1.

1. To add text before or after the answer box students see, click add displayFormat and enter Pre-Text or Post-Text.
2. To add a variable that students try to solve, click beside Solve-For and enter the variable.

The system automatically adds an equal sign between the variable you enter and the Units box (shown above as y= ).

3. To add a unit that corresponds to a numerical value, click beside Units and enter the TeX- formatted unit.

For numeric answers, student answers are considered correct if they match the coded answer to the specified tolerance (default is 2%). The value in the Tolerance field (above both the Correct Answers and Wrong Answers areas) applies to ALL correct and incorrect answers in the item, unless you change the tolerance for individual answers.

[Optional] To change the tolerance, click add @tolerance and specify another value. For example, to specify a 1% tolerance, you would enter 0.01.

To show the rounding message to students:

• Choose the add_@showAddRoundingMsg attribute when the student response from the current part is used for a calculation of a subsequent part. For example, the student calculates a response for Part A. The response from part A is needed in the calculation of Part B. The student should use the full precision number from Part A in the Part B calculation.
• Rounding message that will then appear to students after they submit a response:
  "If you need this result for any later calculation in this item, keep all the digits and round as the final step before submitting your answer."

For more details, see How significant figures and tolerance work in Mastering and/or Guidelines for setting significant figures and tolerance.

1. Enter the correct value in the Value section of the Correct Answer(s) box.
2. [Optional] To display more or less than 3 digits for numerical answers, click add @format and enter the number of digits.
   If no format is specified, numeric answers are displayed to 3 significant figures, without using scientific notation for values like 200. Mastering evaluates the student answer against the truncated formatted Correct Answer. (For more information, see Display of numeric values and Display of numeric variable values.)

Note: For both physics and engineering vector notation, you must code vector answer values using infix, with subscripts using tags that end in either vec or evec.

• For physics, F_k_vec is the only acceptable notation for vectors with subscript answer values.
• For engineering, F_k_evec is the only acceptable notation for vectors with subscript answer values.

If you're editing an item that uses older codes (F_vec_k or F_evec_k), update the answers using the new ones, above.

Though not required, it's recommended that you include wrong answer feedback responses.

Important: Before evaluation, wrong answer responses truncate to the default 3 significant figures—regardless of the format selected for the correct answer. To edit the format and/or tolerance for student responses that trigger a wrong answer response, see step 3 below.

To include wrong answer responses:

1. Click add expression under Value in the Wrong Answer(s) box.
2. Enter one or more wrong answers, entering more specific ones first.

3. [Optional] For each wrong answer, you can set a format, a tolerance, or both. If you don’t set a format and tolerance for the wrong answer value, these will match the default significant figures format (round to 3 sig figs) first and then apply the default tolerance (2%) used for the correct answer.

   • Significant figure format: In the format field on the left, enter a value enclosed by curly brackets for the number of significant figures to round off to.
   • Grading tolerance: In the tolerance field on the left, enter a value in decimal format (not percent) to represent the size of the tolerance. For example, you can enter .03 for a grading tolerance of 3%.
     
     Tip: To determine the upper and lower bounds of the tolerance threshold, use value/(1-0.01*threshold %) for the upper bound and value*(1-0.01*threshold %) for the lower bound, where the bounds are exclusive.
     
     
   • You can ignore the type field on the left.

   For more details about how these values work, see How significant figures and tolerance work in Mastering and/or Guidelines for setting significant figures and tolerance.

4. Click add response, and enter text that displays when students submit this incorrect answer.
5. To add rows to the table for additional responses, click a row and select either Insert before > option > expression or Insert after > option > expression.

To add a row after the last one, you can also place the cursor in the last row and press the Tab key.