Hi,

unfortunately Maple T.A. 5 is looking more and more like a significant downgrade from Maple T.A. 2.5, our prior version. In particular, the question repository has seriously increased the amount of time it takes to administer questions and assignments (see my comment in the thread "TA5 question repository" in this forum for some of the ugly details), and since writing that piece we've encountered even more debilitating behaviour. I am writing in the hope someone...

Hi, does anyone know if it's possible to "get hold of" the username of the student taking a test in Maple T.A.? That is, is there a variable that contains this string? This could prove useful for personalising question content (think of individual seeds for random number generation, or keys in cryptographic contexts). We would love to be able to (predictably) provide a customised question for each student by somehow hashing up the username, and writing a question which uses that variable. If there's an alternative to this I'd very much like to hear about it: in essence we wish to grasp hold of something that's unique to the student who's logged in.

Hi,

we've been happily using Brownstone's latex -> edu conversion service for some time now, but always with that slightly queasy feeling of "what happens if it's unavailable?". Well that's the case at the moment: I've submitted a ticket with their support folk, but times in Australia don't match up well with US times! In the meantime we have a number of assignments due to be made available to students, but which only exist as latex files. Conversion by hand is, to say the least, painful and time consuming (our Level I coordinator has already converted two by hand, and doesn't need another few hours of such nonsense), so I'm hoping that there may be another way in which this can be done. Any suggestions?