Note: You are currently viewing documentation for Moodle 1.9. Up-to-date documentation for the latest stable version is available here: Quiz FAQ.


What happens if students submit answers after the quiz closing date?

It is possible for students to still submit answers after the quiz has closed (for example if they started the attempt before the closing date but then took a long time before submitting). These responses are stored by the quiz module, but the students are not given any credit for them. The teacher can see these answers when reviewing the student's attempts and can give the student credit for them by hand. Also the teacher could change the closing date after the fact and regrade the attempts. The students answers would then get graded.

Why am I no longer allowed to add or remove questions?

Most likely it is because you have students that have already attempted the quiz. You will need to delete all of the attempts by selecting them and choosing to delete them if you need to add/remove questions from a quiz.

Why can't I set a longer quiz time limit?

The maximum quiz time limit seems to be 10 minutes less than the session timeout set for Moodle. (In 1.6 quiz time limit will not be limited by session timeout). If you want longer quiz time limits in 1.5, you would need to log in as administrator, and click "Configuration" under the administration section on the main page, then click "Variables", and find "Session Timeout", and set it to something longer.

Session timeout is the length of time the site will allow a user to be inactive (not loading pages) before they are automatically logged out (and presumably lose some session data if they were still working - albeit slowly). There isn't really any serious problem setting this to 2 or even 3 hours - as long as the student isn't silly enough to leave a shared computer with their login active on the server. Long story short - logout when done.

How can I turn off glossary auto-linking in a quiz?

  • There is an html code <nolink> question goes here </nolink> which can prevent links, including glossary from being shown.
  • Under site administration, filters, there is a switch which can hide glossary. Turning this off when a quiz is open is one option. There are several hacks which may turn off glossary during a quiz.
  • For those who want to be brave and turn off glossary for all quizzes on the site or in other areas, this forum thread should be useful. Paul Evans on 11 October 2004, 06:41 PM suggested this hack be added to the moodle/mod/glossary/filter.php file. Insert in the line right after 'global $CFG' the following lines.
       // suggested by Paul Evans 11 October 2004 in the Glossary Module forum
       // Nolink for quizzes (or any other word in the path you like)
       // $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] looks like e.g. : /mysite/mod/quiz/view.php?id=21
       if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "/quiz/")) {
           return $text;
       }

This works in 1.6 and turns off glossary for all quizzes on the site. New users please note that the filter.php file can be opened by a simple text editor. Do a copy on everything in the shaded box above and paste it right after the line which has global$CFG which is near the top of the file.

How can I remove a problem question after the quiz has been taken?

Set the score for that question to 0.

Can I have a quiz that is not graded?

This is not a common requirement, so it may not work perfectly, but you can get close:

  1. On the quiz editing page, set the score for each question, and the total score for the quiz to 0.
  2. On the quiz settings page, there is a grid of check-boxes. Turn off all the ones in the score column.


== How can I disable the "Submit page" button on quizzes? I'd like to only have the "save without submit" and the "submit and finish" buttons. According to one part of this wiki, it's optional, but I can't find a place to un-choose the option.

  • Submit page (optional)