- I want to take a quick moment to introduce you to student-produced response questions. These are not a big deal or anything to be stressed out about. I just want you to know what to expect and have a basic idea of this question type so that they're not unfamiliar for you.

Basically, any question that is not multiple choice in the math section is going to be student-produced response. That means exactly what it sounds like. You as the student will produce your own answer. In other words, there are no answer choices.

So your answer does need to be a number. You're not going to be looking for algebra here. This is going to be solving for a number. And you're going to type in your answer using the keyboard, either the onscreen keyboard or an attached keyboard, depending on whether you're using a laptop or a tablet to take the exam.

There's only one answer you're going to enter. And I mention that because once in a while, a question will ask something like, "What is one solution to this equation?" So there could be two solutions. You only enter one of them. As long as it answers the question, you will earn the point for that.

What kind of numbers can you put in? You can have positive or negative answers. And technically zero is neither positive nor negative. So you could have any sign, positive, negative, or zero. Your answer could be a whole number. It could be a decimal. It could be a fraction.

It could be decimals that do not terminate. It could be repeating decimals. We'll talk about what to do with that. You should not enter a mixed number. So if you get a mixed number as an answer, we have to do something about it and I'll show you what to do.

There won't be any algebra in your answers, so no Xs, no Ys, no variables. And here are the rules about characters. This is important because it could affect your right answer. You can use up to five characters for your answer or six characters in the case of a negative, because the negative sign is going to count as that extra difference between five and six.

Notice I said characters and not digits, because if your answer is a fraction or a decimal, the fraction bar or the decimal point is going to count as one of those characters. So in that case, we need to be careful that we're using up five or six spaces.

If you have a fraction that's too many numbers, too many digits for you to type in, you can turn it into a decimal. For example, if you had something like, this wouldn't be a likely test answer, but something like 300 over 299, that's way too many digits.

So you would turn that into its decimal equivalent. We'll talk about the rules for decimals. Here's the rules that we're going to talk about. If you need to, you can round a decimal or cut a decimal off in order to fit the correct number of characters.

Notice we have four digits here and that's different from five characters because again, the decimal point is one of the characters leaving you four spaces for numerical digits. And we'll look at some examples.

You should not input any symbols like a dollar sign or a percent sign. If those are part of the question, then that's already going to be built in. Don't type it in the box. Some examples are going to show us exactly what we mean about this number of characters thing.

So let's say you solved a question and you got two and one-fourth as the answer. That is a mixed number. We can't enter it as is, but we could convert it to a decimal. We could enter 2.25, that would be correct.

We could enter 2.250. That's equal, it's the same, and it fills up the five characters. That's fine. We could convert it to an improper fraction, nine over four. That would be correct.

But if we try to input the mixed number, if we typed in 21 over four or 2 space 1 over four, those will not be accepted as correct. What if you have a decimal that does not terminate, something like one-sixth? If you put that in your calculator, you'll see that that's 1.666666 repeating.

The sixes will go on forever. You could type in just one-sixth, an answer as a fraction. You earn the point for that. Or you can fill up five characters, including the decimal. You could do 0.166, just cut off the end of the digits, or 0.1667, rounding.

You could put a zero in front of the decimal and then end with 0.166 or 0.167. All of those are correct options. However, if you don't use up all five characters, then that won't be accepted. So if we only used say .167 or .166 without the zero in front, we haven't filled up all the characters.

Or if you rounded too soon, then you're not going to be correct. Very similarly with negatives, we have six characters, so the negative sign is one of them, and then fill up the remaining five if needed. Negative two-thirds is a great option.

Or if you want to use decimals, just like we did with one-sixth a moment ago, fill up those five more characters. So 0.666, 0.6667, negative 0.666 or 0.667. But on the right hand side, we have not filled up all the characters, so there are four answers that are close, but will not be graded as correct.

Bottom line is this, know what the instructions are and follow them. That's why we talked about them in this lesson. And on the test, if you're stressed about how to enter decimal and get it correct, you can always refer back to the instructions during the exam.

Ideally, you won't need to just because that uses up more time. And that's all there is to it.