A+ v1.20 Release Notes
Aug 2023
A+ v1.20.0
New features
- In the A+ “Your points” page that shows the student’s results in each course module, expired modules are no longer completely hidden from the page. The user may select from the new options at the top whether all modules should be fully visible or whether closed modules should be collapsed to show only the heading. In addition, the page may automatically scroll down to the currently active course module. Added shortcuts for adding deadline deviations (personal extensions) to a student. The shortcut links have been added to the student’s participant page (overview of the results) and the inspect submission page.
- Course news may be emailed to the course staff in addition to the students.
- Updated the styles of code highlighting (e.g., when a submitted source code file is opened in A+). The new styles correspond to modern Github.com styles.
- Active element output sections do not break and stay empty if the server sets a warning message to the user’s session, e.g., about the deadline.
- Questionnaires:
- Fixed the “group_errors” mode that had been broken for several years. This mode enables grouping multiple questions together so that the student earns points only by answering correctly to all questions in the group.
- Added a reminder to the feedback of checkbox questions: checkbox questions require fully correct answers in order to earn any points. (This affects the default case when granting partial points is disabled.)
- Grading containers using the latest version of the grading-base image 4.9 support detection of too large feedback output. The submission receives informative feedback that it produces too much output during grading. In older versions, the grading results can not be delivered due to the large size and the submission feels stuck in A+ as it never receives feedback.
MOOC-Grader
- Added question group grading to questionnaires. When this mode is enabled, the student gains points from a group of questions only if he/she correctly answers all questions in the group.
A-plus-rst-tools
- Added possibility to enable faster RST builds. This is based on (old) Sphinx features, but with a new setup, this recognizes changes in the assignment YAML files too. Thus, the faster build should never ignore some parts of the course changes, which makes it worthwhile and reliable.
- Added configurable tolerance parameters for floating-point number comparison in the freetext directive (under questionnaires). Thus, questions with floating-point numbers are not hindered by a constant, hardcoded tolerance value.
- Category settings may be set easily in conf.py (e.g., to enable unofficial submissions). They used to require hacky setups with “append_content”.
- Added alias ‘pick-randomly’ for questionnaire option ‘pick_randomly’.
- Active elements are set to allow unofficial submissions by default. Typically, active elements do not affect grading and thus, unofficial submissions easily enable submissions after the module deadline.
Notes for developers and administrators as well as REST API users
- The REST API endpoint for listing the course assignments performs faster by using caching (api/v2/courses/
/exercises/) - The html_url field in the exercise REST API points to the chapter page if the assignment is embedded in a chapter.
- Added new fields to the exercise REST API: consecutive_order, parent_name and status.
- Updated JavaScript libraries to the latest versions.
- Submissions in the ERROR or REJECTED statuses are included in the points cache. This affects some user interface menus and APIs that used to ignore those submissions.
- The Django web framework is upgraded to version 4.2.