## AMCnumericChoices with significant = true: how to also ask for exponent, beside mantissa?

Hello,

thank you so much for this very good piece of software which is AMC.

I'm interested in asking numerical questions where students should answer using scientific notation, as in 1.23 \times 10^4, where the mantissa would be 1.23 and the exponent 4.
It looks like AMCnumericChoices is the right tool, and I can even use it like
\AMCnumericChoices{1.23}{digits = 3, significant = true} to ask for the mantissa, but I'm not sure at all about how could I ask for the exponent.

Can you help me to figure it out?

Ideally I would like to consider mantissa and exponent as two parts of the answer to the same question, rather than as two single answers to two separate questions, and the answer should be awarded scoreexact points if both parts are correct; I would also like to use approx and scoreapprox, and it seems to me that it would be reasonable to request the exponent to be exactly correct, while the mantissa could be off by a maximum amount of approx to award scoreapprox points to the answer: WRT to 1.23\times 10^4 as the correct answer, 1.22\times 10^4 should qualify with approx = 1, while 1.23\times 10^5 should not qualify.

-- Davide G.M. Salvetti

### Replies (3)

#### RE: AMCnumericChoices with significant = true: how to also ask for exponent, beside mantissa? - Added by Alexis Bienvenüealmost 10 years ago

I'm not sure at all about how could I ask for the exponent.

I'm afraid there is no satisfying solution, but to add this feature as a new AMCnumericChoices option.

#### RE: AMCnumericChoices with significant = true: how to also ask for exponent, beside mantissa? - Added by Davide G.M. Salvettialmost 10 years ago

Thank you for your answer, it would be most useful a feature to me.

Thinking for definiteness to the horizontal format, perhaps the layout could be implemented by adding <expdigits> (say) exponent rows with figures from 0 to 9 separated by some sort of horizontal rule from the preceding <digits> mantissa rows; maybe something along these lines, with digits = 3 and expdigits = 2:

+---+----- mantissa ------+
|   | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
| + | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
| - | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
+---+----- exponent ------+
| + | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
| - | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
+---+---------------------+


Then the software logic for the mantissa could stay more or less the same as the current one, while the exponent could be catered for by multiplying the mantissa score by (codedExponent == correctExponent)?1:0.

Thank you, regards,
-- Davide G.M. Salvetti

#### RE: AMCnumericChoices with significant = true: how to also ask for exponent, beside mantissa? - Added by Davide G.M. Salvettialmost 10 years ago

I'm sorry, in my example of course I forgot to add a <decimal separator> to the layout between the first and second row of the mantissa, and, by the way, the TeX boxes reading "mantissa" and "exponent" should be user customizable.

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