This should be easy for you veteran TA question bank writers. (I'm still a rank beginner so go slow on your answer please!) Students who enter the correct derivative but use 0.5 instead of 1/2 for an exponent or who enter a single-term answer (while MAPLE spits out some quotient rule derivatives with more than one term) get "incorrect answers" because evalb doesn't come up with a 0 (somehow) in the difference (literally speaking) between a student decimal or one-term answer and Maple's. I've gotten past some of this by using FACTOR for both the Maple and Student entries, but do not know how to get around the decimal exponent (aside from warning students in the problem they should avoid decimals for exponents.) Perhaps there is an entirely different approach here besides trying to anticipate differences between student answers and Maple's. Any thoughts most welcome.

It is some consolation to see I am not the only one new to TA with both great interest in developing question banks (as the potential seems to be there in TA for interactive learning with immediate feedback) as well as some frustration in learning how to write what I assume are more involved questions. For instance, questions that appear to require "LaTex" for authoring interactive graphs. I too know nothing about "LaTex" and would love to have more accessible sources for learning than stumbling about the help menus. Doug's interest in sharing question banks (and at the same time his reluctance to give away his work without getting something in return) are good points. I hope to start using TA this fall for geometry and some algebra review as well as topics in the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum that include calculus, statistics, vectors, etc. I would have great interest in sharing my question banks if I start generating the kinds of non-trivial questions I hope to create. Meanwhile I am stuck on what I assume are basics in TA like using algorithmic variables to generate linear / quadratic graphs that change each time they are accessed (is this possible? The graphing option doesn't seem to support algorithmic variables) and stuck on even more basic details like getting Maple 11 to graph a function AND key points at the same time (I can't get Maple to execute "pointplot" and a function graph on the same axes... sigh...) which would be nice for letting students unambiguously identify key coordinates on a graph (exact coordinates of intercepts, max and min's, etc.) - - Randy Carspecken