Manually setting the total number of points in the exam document class

Question

I am writing an exam using the exam document class. In the exam you only need to answer 10 out of 12 questions (10 points each question). When I create the grade table with the command \gradetable, the total number of points is 120.

How can I manually set the total number of points to 100?

Answer 1

I don't think that this is possible without changing the class file. Since exams with the structure that you describe are pretty common, it might be worth emailing the author of the class to request that he adds this feature.

In the meantime, here is a horribly crude workaround. Make a new copy of exam.cls, and call it something different; say myexam.cls. In your exam, change your document class to myexam, and add something along the lines of

\newcommand{\mytotalpoints}{100}

Then open the myexam.cls file, and search for the string

\prt@hlfcntr{tbl@points}

Replacing the correct instance of this with

\mytotalpoints

will do the trick. Exactly where the change needs to be made depends on the type of gradetable that you use. A bit of trial and error may be needed.

Answer 2

After a quick back-and-forth with the class author and maintainer, he added the requested functionality and posted the beta version on his website. Please check and report back (here or directly to him) if there is any trouble.

From the top of the file:

%--------------------------------------------------------------------
% Version 2.315$\beta$, 2010/12/21:
%
% New commands:
%
%  \settabletotalpoints
%  \settabletotalbonuspoints
%
% Each of those takes one argument.  After giving the command
% \settabletotalpoints{numpoints}, any grade or point table (partial
% or full) will list the total points as numpoints instead of the
% actual total number of points in the table.
%
% After giving the command \settabletotalbonuspoints{numbonuspoints},
% any grade or point table will list the total bonus points as
% numbonuspoints instead of the actual total number of bonus points in
% the table.
%
% These commands are intended for exams in which students are asked to
% do some subset of the problems, but not all of them, and so the
% total number of points possible is less than the sum of the points
% for all of the questions.
%
%
% To have one of these commands affect only a single table, confine the
% command and the \gradetable command inside of a group, as in
%
%   \begingroup
%     \settabletotalpoints{100}
%     \gradetable[v][questions]
%   \endgroup
%
% or even just
%
%   \begin{center}
%     \settabletotalpoints{100}
%     \gradetable[v][questions]
%   \end{center}
%
%--------------------------------------------------------------------

I think that that this is what you wanted.

Answer 3

Use Bonus Points for the two last questions (changing the text so that it seems the same) then they will not get added.

Alternatively, I think that you can turn off and then back on the summation of point, but this is all from reading the manual...never actually tried it.

---

edit: now I did a minimal example:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,addpoints]{exam}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
\bonuspointpoints{point}{points}
\begin{questions}
\question[10]
hello
\bonusquestion[10]
goodbye
\end{questions}
\numpoints
\end{document}

or alternatively

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,addpoints]{exam}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
\bonuspointpoints{point}{points}
\begin{questions}
\question[10]
hello
\bonusquestion[10]
goodbye
\end{questions}
\numpoints
\end{document}

which both result in

No class editing required!