On arrival at Nottingham I have inherited a manual of buggy behaviour exhibited by Questionmark Perception. I took this to the CETL-MSOR Conference 2009 and, unbelievable as some of them seem, found broad agreement that the problems have been experienced at other universities.
This document refers to numeric entry questions as very problematic. In this post, I will attempt to recreate the problems related to this question type.
In the video below you will see what happens when the question asks for a number of decimal places but there is a trailing zero. Is the answer QMP allows in fact correct?
In the video below you will see what happens when the correct answer to a numeric question is an integer and a decimal answer is entered.
(N.B. if a decimal answer is used then it works as you would expect. i.e. if you set the answer to be 4.5 then it doesn’t accept 4.51. So if you set the answer to be 4.0 then it expects a decimal and doesn’t truncate the decimal part.)
In the following clip we see what happens when one of the answers is zero.
(N.B. If there is only one numeric entry box this doesn’t happen – QMP says “Question not answered”. But if there is more than one it counts it as answered.)
I find it incredible that anyone would release software with such bugs, especially for paying customers. The only solution offered by my predecessor and those I met at the conference is to find workarounds to avoid the bugs (i.e. no numeric questions where the answer is zero, enter integer answers as decimal when setting the question – 4 as 4.0 and so on, no trailing zeroes). If anyone has a better idea I would be pleased to hear it!
