Can parts of the grader.check() output be hidden without hiding the entire test?

[jake-bobowski]

Is it possible to hide parts of the output from grader.check() and display only a custom failure_message?

Here is screenshot of an example configuration notebook:

There is a single multiple-choice question and students should enter 'a' as the answer. Here's what students see in their notebooks when entering a valid, but incorrect response.

I've set a custom failure_message that, in this case, says "Please try again". The output of grader.check() reveals the correct answer by displaying "a1_1.lower() == 'a'". Is it possible to hide parts of this output while displaying only the custom failure_message? I'd like students to know that they've entered an incorrect response without revealing the correct answer. In this toy example, the failure_message is not useful, but it could be setup to provide valuable feedback/hints in a real-life example.

Thanks!

Jake
@Jaymes92 @jake-bobowski

[joelostblom]

I think this would be very useful as well and I started this work in #536, but won't have time to pick that up in another few months unfortunately. Help welcome!

[aaronsmoore]

A temporary workaround that I've been using has been hashing the multiple choice answers so students only see a hashed version of the answer like this:

Not sure this is what you're looking for but I can send more details if you're interested.

[jake-bobowski]

Thanks @aaronsmoore, that looks great! I would definitely be interested in seeing the details.

[aaronsmoore]

All credit to the D102 team for this method.

You'll use the following function to hash students' answers.

import hashlib

def get_hash(num):
    """Helper function for assessing correctness"""
    return hashlib.md5(str(num).encode()).hexdigest()

The general workflow looks something like this.

There are some other considerations for multiple-answer questions such as sorting the student answer list/numpy array so it lines up with the hashed answer.

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

[jake-bobowski]

Hi @aaronsmoore, Thanks so much for the suggestion. It was really helpful and easy to implement. Here's an example use from our first-year physics course:

[chrispyles]

I hope the hashing solution temporarily helps with this issue @jake-bobowski. Since this seems like the same ask as #419, I'm going to de-dupe it in favor of that one.