Something in the last days destroyed the useful testing of sentences with not needed sentence part, which makes a lot of sentences totally useless now.
Is this an momentary bug, like when sometimes alternative answers aren’t correct although they were typed in correctly, or is this a new feature?
easy example:
german question:
‘jemanden zur Sau machen’
hungarian answer
eltolni (valakit)
So until now: ‘eltolni’ was correct and also ‘eltolni valakit’ was correct. But now only ‘eltolni’ is correct or if you write the answers with parenthesis like ‘eltolni (valakit)’. Which is kind of stupid… the simple ‘eltolni valakit’ isn’t correct anymore because the ‘()’ are missing. That is totally annoying and now for 2 days already.
And same. Happened within the last 7 days for me. It only affects a new course I’m developing; an old course I have still allows me to enter “eltolni” (to use OP’s example).
Yeah I’d noticed this too. It’s particularly bad in some of the official German courses where words that the course creator obviously considered optional are included in parentheses but you now get punished for typing the optional/extra words, unless you also remember to put (unnecessary) parentheses around them…
In the last year it was easily possible to add optional words like:
english - german
(to) fly - fliegen
(a) house - das Haus
and if it was asked for ‘fliegen’, it was correct to type just ‘fly’, but it was also correct to type ‘to fly’. (and it was also correct to write ‘(to) fly’)
but since three weeks only ‘fly’ is correct. ‘to fly’ isn’t counted as correct anymore. (Just ‘(to) fly’ would be also correct.)
And these are just easy examples.
Same for me. For example in Advanced English cours there is “keep (close) tabs on” expression/ Before it was possible to write either “keep (close) tabs on” or “keep tabs on”, both variants regarded as correct, now only “keep tabs on” is correct.
That regular expression causes anything between the parentheses to be stripped out, both in what you type and what it’s checking against. So if the answer contains “a (b)” it strips out the “(b)” to leave “a” and compares that with whatever you type. This actually means you can put whatever you like between parentheses in your answer and it will be ignored!
But it’s not trivial to fix, as it needs to be able to do two comparisons, one with the answer with the parenthetical parts stripped out, and one with them remaining (but with the parenthesis characters themselves removed). If I had access to the full source I don’t doubt I could fix pretty easily, but I’ve sent similar suggestions to Memrise in the past and they’ve been consistently ignored. Further they did have this working previously and it shouldn’t hard at all to restore the correct logic.
(edit: the way it is now the problem goes right back up to the ‘score’ function, which removes anything inside parentheses from the typed response. But one simple fix would be to modify getTypingTestAccepted( ) to add in the accepted answer with parentheses to the returned array, which would at least allow a user to type in the full answer without the parentheses characters, even though it would still ignore any random stuff you type between ( and ) in the answer)
Note that this removes all punctuation characters from the answer and checks that it matches what you’ve typed. In some cases this might produce slightly unexpected results, but still better than what it is now.