Factoring Practice

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Unlimited Practice for Polynomial Factoring.

NOTE: These are all randomized problems. As a result, it is entirely possible to get pretty awful numbers if you are suitably unlucky. Some of these may look bad until you start doing them, but if you see problems that look excessively awful, remember that you can always hit the ‘Another’ button in the top (green refresh arrow) to get new numbers. If you find yourself doing this frequently, you may want to discuss it with your TA to see if you have a gap in your understanding, or to see if the problems are just really that bad (in which case the TA will forward the info to the content authors).

This is a comprehensive factoring practice page. Each of the problems below are randomly generated and randomly drawn from all the different types of factoring we have learned in the polynomial chapter. Each time you hit the “Another” button in the top right corner, the type of technique necessary and the values of each of the problems will change randomly.

I highly encourage you to keep redoing this page by hitting that “Another” button in the top right until you are able to answer each of the problems relatively easily and can quickly recognize which technique to use on any given problem.

Note: I have rewritten the factor checking algorithm from scratch to make it significantly more robust. You should no longer have problems with factoring out negative signs or using exponents on powers - e.g. writing something like: $-3(x-1)^3(x+1)(x^2+1)$ will now be correctly parsed and accepted.
The only known bug currently is that exponents themselves must be fully simplified, so writing $(x-1)^3$ should work, but writing $(x-1)^{2+1}$ would be parsed incorrectly and marked wrong.
Fixed a bug that was marking negative coefficients in front of a single x value as wrong in some rare circumstances (first problem should now work).