Choose brackets for matrices at course level rather than problem level?
Opened this issue · 4 comments
Is there a way, or could their be a way to choose the brackets (round or square) for matrices at the course level. That way, when borrowing problems from multiple sources with different preferences, the problems would all look the same in a given course.
Assuming this doesn't currently exist, it would be nice if this course setting took precedence over the problem setting so that it could serve the intended purpose of overriding an author's preference with the instructor's preference.
There may be other similar sorts of settings that could use this same treatment.
I'm not clear on what you're requesting here. I'm guessing you're talking about the bracket option for the matrixformat function, but in many/most cases authors don't use that, and the asciimath for the matrices are hand-written by the question author. In those cases, a higher level setting wouldn't make a difference
There is not currently a way to override question behavior at a higher level (like assessment or course level). I am very hesitant to add a way, and here's an example of why. Suppose a teacher uses an override like this to change the tolerance in questions, but not understanding the specifics of the question they do it in a way that is not reasonable. Then the question marks a student wrong, and the teacher sends a "your question is broken" message to the author, when really it was their override's fault.
Sorry for not getting back to this sooner. I was out of town some the last couple weeks.
My specific use case comes from my experience looking for linear algebra problems and is only about how the mathematical notation is displayed, not how the solution is evaluated.
One specific example is whether round or square brackets are placed around a matrix. This can indeed be set matrix by matrix using matrixformat( ... bracket = ...). But this introduces a big inefficiency when borrowing problems. Say I prefer [ ] and I find some good problems from an author (let's call him Todd) who prefers ( ). To use Todd's problems I must either live with the notational mismatch across problems in my assessment, or I have to edit his problems, finding each instance of a displayed matrix and modifying it from "(" to "[" (or deleting it, since "[" is the default in this case).
It would be one step better if the choice of bracket could be set at the problem, rather than matrix level. And a workaround for this would be to assign "(" to a string variable and then use that in the call to matrixformat(). Of course, Todd didn't do that.
Ideally, I'd like to set this preference at a level higher than an individual problem so it would be easier to get consistent results across an assessment or even a course.