openwebwork/webwork2

Achievement points not awarded during reduced credit period

Closed this issue · 4 comments

It seems that if you are in the reduced credit window and correctly answer a question, you get no points towards leveling up. I suspect that somewhere, a test is done based on the score being 1, but during reduced credit the score is 0.75 or something less than 1.

Not sure if this should be changed. Users could either get the full amount of achievement points for correctly answering a question during the reduced credit window, or could get that amount scaled by the reduced credit factor. I would support just awarding all the achievement points.

We need to discuss what we want to do with this. I have implemented it to make achievements work on the unreduced score. We just need to decide if this is what is desired. I have implemented it to give all achievement points and completely ignore the reduced score using the full unreduced score instead. This can be tweaked to give a reduced score if desired.

Thanks for your work on this. My preference would be to do it as you have done it, granting the full achievement points, and here are my reasons.

  • If the purpose of reduced credit is to incentivize the student to do their assignment earlier, and if the reduced score itself hasn't motivated them to do that, then it doesn't seem likely that reducing their achievement points would have an effect of motivizing them.
  • The purpose of achievements is to incentivize completing more work. Partly from giving the meaningless dopamine hits from winning something, and partly for the objective of earning items. For a student who is already behind (in the reduced credit window) earning certain items could make a difference in their motivation to do more work. Like the item to reopen a closed set, or the item to just grant yourself 100% on an assignment. I would want to put those goals within reach, as much as possible, if they can motivate the student to complete more exercises.

In my limited use of achievements, I thought it might be nice to reduce the number of achievement points in the reduced scoring period. So instead of earning 5 points per correct problem, they only earn 3. I was personally thinking instead of using a percentage reduction, maybe have a configuration field that you can set the number of achievement points correct answers earn during the reducing scoring period. Note I would only reduce the points for the 'per problem earnings', the additional achievements should still earn full points.

Fixed in #2301