Short Answer

Short answer questions provide an answer box for students to type in.

Here are general templates you can use for creating a short answer question, and what this code is displayed as:

Integer input:

<pl-integer-input answers-name="ans" placeholder="Type answer here"></pl-integer-input>

Floating-point number input:

<pl-number-input answers-name="ans" placeholder="Type answer here"></pl-string-input>

String input:

<pl-string-input answers-name="ans" placeholder="Type answer here" remove-leading-trailing="true"></pl-string-input>

All are displayed as:

<pl-integer-input> only accepts integer answers, <pl-number-input> only accepts floating-point number answers with built in tolerance, and <pl-string-input> accepts any type of answer. Therefore, <pl-string-input> can be used for integer or number answers as well. Note that nothing should be placed in between the opening and closing tags for each of these input boxes.

All 3 tags are required to have the attribute answers-name, and I recommend leaving it as "ans" just for simplicity, especially when randomizing questions or adding custom answer parsing. The placeholder attribute is optional but recommended for clarity. The remove-leading-trailing="true" attribute for <pl-string-input> is recommended to remove leading and trailing whitespace from the student’s submitted answer before grading (e.g. " Hello world " → "Hello world")

To set a single correct answer (checked by basic number/string equality), you need to edit server.py for the question and add the following function:

def generate(data):
    data["correct_answers"]["ans"] = x

where x is replaced by your correct answer in the corresponding data type for the type of input box.

To add custom answer parsing for multiple correct answers or partial credit, edit server.py for the question and add the following function:

def grade(data):
    score = 0
    ans = data["submitted_answers"]["ans"] # Student's submitted answer
    
    # Update score to a value between 0.0 and 1.0 based on ans

    data["score"] = score

You can use Python string comparison or RegEx to write your custom grading function. data["score"] should be set to a value between 0.0 and 1.0 to represent the score the student should receive for their response.

You only need to add one function (either generate or grade) to server.py depending on how you want the question to be graded.

Customization

String input ignore case

Add the attribute ignore-case="true" to <pl-string-input> to disable case sensitivity.

String input multiline answer

Add the attribute multiline="true" to <pl-string-input> to allow the student to answer with multiple lines of text.

You can read the official PrairieLearn documentation on <pl-integer-input> here, <pl-number-input> here, and <pl-string-input> here.