Checks provided factoring to see if it matches author’s factoring.

This validator checks to see if the provided “factored form” from the student is actually factored in a similar way to the author-provided “factored form”. For example, if you have the polynomial , you might want the student to just do the factor by grouping step and want them to enter in . Try trying in the full polynomial versus a fully factored version, versus the desired version:
Now, let’s say you want them to fully factor, not just factor by grouping. Try the factor by grouping version versus unfactored vs fully factored here:
Adding another problem here that deliberately has some repeated factors to test out if they work. The answer should be (Also testing the ’not fully factored version is the target to accept’).

Finally, made a sage generated version so that we can make sure nothing about sage syntax messes things up.
Actual answer should be . [Also stress testing to make sure larger number of factors isn’t an issue.]

Potential Problems and Pitfalls

The current generation of Ximera really isn’t designed to have this level of custom validation check - so the actual validator code is remarkably hacky and intensely exploits how the data was saved in the backend of the javascript libraries at the time I wrote the validator. The current generation of this validator is fairly robust, but future patches to underlying systems may break it. Currently, as long as numeric exponents are actually simplified (e.g. students write an exponent as 2 instead of 1+1) things seem to work pretty much as expected (including correctly handling negative signs, simplified exponents, and fractions). Some irrational and weird numbers might cause issues, but that is more to do with needing to figure out how numbers in weird formats might be submitted or encoded and I don’t have enough data for that yet.