Student-produced response

A quarter of the section, no answer choices, and formatting rules that cost real points.

2 min read

About 25% of Math questions — roughly 11 of 44 — have no answer choices. You type the answer into a box.

Two things change: the elimination strategies are gone, and format errors become possible. A correct value entered in an unacceptable form is marked wrong.

The rules

  • Up to 5 characters for a positive answer, up to 6 including a minus sign.
  • Fractions and decimals both accepted. 3/4, 0.75, and .75 are all fine.
  • Don't round early. If the answer doesn't fit, give as many decimal places as the box allows — truncating or rounding is accepted, but only at the last available digit. 2/3 → .6666 or .6667, not .67.
  • A fraction is safer than a decimal for repeating values. 2/3 is exact and short; there's no rounding decision to get wrong.
  • No symbols. No commas, no dollar signs, no percent signs, no units. $1,200 is typed 1200. 45% is typed as the number the question wants — read the stem to see whether that's 45 or .45.
  • Mixed numbers are not accepted. 1½ must be 3/2 or 1.5. Typed as 11/2 it reads as eleven halves and is marked wrong.
  • Negative answers are allowed; the minus sign counts toward the character limit.
  • If more than one value is correct, enter one. Quadratics with two roots: either is accepted, unless the question says otherwise ("give the least value").

Where the points actually go

Not the formatting — the misread. With no answer choices, there's no sanity check from seeing your value listed, so solving for the wrong quantity goes undetected. On multiple choice, getting 4 when the choices are 8, 12, 16, 20 tells you something's wrong. Here it just gets typed in.

So on every SPR question: re-read the last line of the question before you type.

The checklist, before submitting

  1. Is this the quantity asked for? (x, or 2x?)
  2. Are the units right? (minutes when the question wanted hours?)
  3. Does it fit in the box without rounding away meaning?
  4. Is it plausible? A probability above 1, a negative length, a percentage of 4000 — all impossible, and all worth a two-second look.

Practising

Do SPR questions without the answer visible, and check formatting separately from correctness. Log the two failure types apart: "got the maths wrong" and "got the maths right, typed it wrong" are different problems with different fixes.

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