MathQuill formats an answer in a way that is inconsistent with how WeBWorK interprets it

[JeffAdler]

A student had a problem where the answer was along the lines of: a * sin(x). [Actually, it was a little more complicated, but let's not worry about that.]
When he typed "asin(x)", MathQuill displayed his answer as
a sin(x).
Notice that the leading constant is italicized, leading the student to believe that he has entered the correct answer. However, according to WW's answer preview, the system is interpreting the answer as involving arcsine.
So the issue here is not that WW is doing anything wrong: It's interpreting the answer as expected. Rather, MathQuill giving an incorrect display.

[drgrice1]

What needs to be decided is whether MathQuill is showing the wrong thing or is PG (or MathObjects specifically) interpreting the answer incorrectly. This comes down to should we support asin as an alternate notation for arcsin. Currently MathQuill does not support asin, but PG does. In my opinion asin should not be an alternate notation for arcsin. That is a computer science notation, but not a mathematical one.

[JeffAdler]

Are people willing to change PG in this way? If so, then I agree that that seems like the best solution.

[Alex-Jordan]

I don't think we can change PG to remove asin, unless we patrol for it in the OPL and find that it is not used much. But it seems likely that many problems might have things like Compute("asin(x)") in them.

[drgrice1]

Yeah, that is unfortunate. However, openwebwork/mathquill#28 gives another solution that works with PG allowing asin. However, students will not be able to enter asin when MathQuill is in use. They will need to use arcsin or sin^{-1} instead. With that pull request, if a student types asin then it will appear as a sin(x) and will be interpreted by PG in the same way.