Exercise Variants

Your instructors sometimes offer the same task in several versions — for example the same programming problem in different application domains, or a quiz in an easier and a harder flavor. These versions are called variants, and they are bundled into one variant group.

A variant group behaves like a single exercise: it has one timeline, one points budget, and one entry in your exercise list.

Finding a Variant Group

In the exercise list, a whole variant group appears as a single card, marked with a group icon and a blue stripe. The individual variants are not listed separately — that keeps the list short no matter how many variants a group has.

A variant group is one card in the exercise list

Clicking the card opens the group page. The card stays highlighted while you work on one of its variants, and searching for the title of a single variant still finds its group.

The Group Page

The group page shows your points, the shared deadline, and one card per variant

The header shows the information that applies to the whole group:

• Points: what you have earned in the group so far, and the maximum it can contribute to your course score.
• Submission closed / due date: the shared deadline of all variants.
• Variants: how many versions the group contains.

Below it, each variant gets a card with its type, your points, your status and its difficulty. The dates are not repeated per card, because every variant runs on the group's timeline shown in the header.

Click a card to open that variant and work on it exactly like any other exercise — starting, submitting and receiving feedback work as they do for any other exercise.

How Points Are Counted

You may work on any or all of the variants. Your results across the group are added up, and where your instructors set a maximum for the group, the total is capped there.

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Information:

Under a cap, solving a second variant can improve your score up to that maximum but never past it, so working on one variant well is usually enough to earn the full points for the group. Without one, every variant you solve adds its points up to the sum of them all. The header always shows your points against the maximum that applies, and marks it when a cap is what lowers that maximum.

Your course score and course statistics already account for the cap, so the number you see there is the number that counts.

Dates

All variants of a group share the same release, start and due dates. There is no benefit in switching between them for extra time — the deadline is the same everywhere.

After the due date you can keep working on a variant in Practice Mode, provided its exercise type supports it.

Your instructors decide which exercises are bundled into a group, and what the group's points cap and deadline are — see Exercise Variants in the instructor documentation.