I was doing math and answering the problems. I typed in the right answer and it says its wrong. WTF!

Haha that blows and it also sucks you have to use course campus for homework. This girl i hang out with a lot has to use the same gay thing.

Looks like that website is even worse then me at math...and I failed almost every semester in highschool!

luff figured it out, there is a period at the end of my answer...which means that it is wrong. course compass+math=gay

What is that? 3d calc?

I miss easy calculus :(

It is vector calc

Yeah. That's 3d calc. You're doing parametric eqs. amirite?

yep, thats I am doing in the picture.

It's a good example of very poor input validation :)

still sucks, computers should be smart enough to know what i mean

The . has meaning in math. I'm sure if you show the teacher the SS, he might give credit for it. Chances are he'll miss the . and think the system screwed up.

Even if you program the system to ignore non-math characters and spaces, your answer is still "wrong". There's no way to know what the intention of the . is in this context. You could be trying to multiply z with some other variable, or trying to make a decimal number, or trying to do a dot product with something.

Jet your gay for being asain and giving him a complicated answer lol. And yes compass sucks used it in my math class and said F*CK it and didnt do any of it lol

The period at the end of a mathematical equation has no meaning. If the equation is incomplete, it could mean that it's an attempt at a dot product or multiplication etc, but that itself is an extreme version of nitpicking. The reason why this is utterly absurd is because using this kind of logic, you can claim that the number 6.5 is not a decimal number because of the possibility that it might mean 6 multiplied by 5.

When used at the end of any normal equation or expression, it simply means the end of the equation, just like how it signifies the end of a sentence. It is really as simple as that. I do it as well as many of my professors (highly qualified professionals with PHDs).

You did nothing wrong. Your Professor will give you full credit for it. In the extremely unlikely case he doesn't and tells you something like what Jet told you, you can actually get him fired. Just trust me on this :)

I'm gonna have to side with reborn on this one. I had to go to my differential equations professor for every other hw, because I would simplify the equation more than the question was asking for, or not enough. Internet validation is awful. For every class. They check if you have the one specific answer that's in the back of the book, and give no partial credit.

If you were to make an ai that has a good recognition system you could make a massive amount of money. Every college would want to use your service. Much cheaper than hiring graders.

Reborn, I wasn't talking in the context of human thinking when I made that statement. It's one thing for a human to see it and say, oh, this . means the end of a sentence, and is not a special math symbol. Programming a computer to do this is different. Unless you have a special rule to check if the . is the last character in a string and override other rules for evaluating . it'll likely evaluate incorrectly and mark the answer as wrong. A human can use common sense to determine if the meaning of a character, a computer can't.

Also, I doubt proper input validation would have caught this problem.
1. The . is a valid math symbol.
2. Adding a rule to say that a . must have a digit on the left and right isn't technically correct, especially in calc where dot products are common.
3. The only rule that would have worked is checking if the . is a terminating character. However, this isn't an English class, so grammatical usages of the . are not likely considered.

Ah, I see what you mean. However, I disagree that it can't be fixed by proper input validation. #3 that you mentioned would have been easy enough for them. Another good approach would be to limit the number of input characters per each textbox to the number of the characters of the proper result. I can understand the reason behind not limiting the characters (to let the students make mistakes without giving them any hints), so I think the simplest solution would be to just explain to the student not to add any unnecessary dots to their answers.

dude if ur in college like i am, then u can take a pic of it an show it to ur professor

yeah i am but i dont care. i still got a 97.4% on the assignment...so whatever. its still stupid

ARGH! I F*CKING HATE MY MATH LAB. IN FACT, I HATE ANY MY*BLANK*LABS. I HATE THEM SO BAD I AM WRITING IN CAPS. I've had to use mymathlab, myaccountinglab and coursecompass and I've hated them all.

yep that pretty much sums it up