Practice Makes Stupid
Automated online testing of the kind made possible by Moodle is a new concept to many educators, even those who have long experience with similar assesments offline.
One group of educators were experimenting with online formative assesment and decided that since the tests were marked automatically, and they had put so much effort into creating the questions, that they should let the students take the quiz as many times as they wanted for revision purposes.
They were naturally curious to see if their students would make use of this facility. Checking the quiz reports they were pleased to see that not only had all the students taken this optional quiz, many had taken it multiple times. This pleasant discovery was somewhat overshadowed when they discovered that the quiz results were clearly declining with each additional attempt.
Worried by this strange phenomenon, the educators tracked down one of the students to see what was going on. The student explained that as part of her revision she merely wanted to read the answer feedback for the incorrect answers she hadn't chosen the first time around.
