Quiz FAQ

Template:Quizzes==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. In the quiz overview report, you can delete their attempt using the "with selected attempts" drop-down.

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?

You can not remove a question once a quiz has been taken by one student or more. However you can change the score and flag the question so you know it has problems.

Set the score for that question to 0.

Caution: In some versions of Moodle if you use this question in an other quiz, this will potentially change the question in that quiz as well. A trick is to score the question as 0, then regrade the just completed quiz. This will establish the new grade for gradebook. Now go back and change the score to the original value.

Find the question in Question Bank. Maybe edit the title (Do not use in Bio101). Or if you do not share the question category with other teachers, create a sub category, move the offending question there, and perhaps create a better question to replace the one you just moved. Create a new quiz and if necessary hide the old one.

Caution: if other departments or teachers use a question category it might be wise to check with the team before moving or changing any question. This is one reason importing questions in a course is a good best practice in some situations.

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:

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

Remember you can tell gradebook not to include the quiz.

How do I allow a person to retake a quiz if I have it set for 1 attempt?

In the quiz overview report, you can delete their attempt using the "with selected attempts" drop-down.

How can I give particular students extra time in a timed quiz?

You can give particular students unlimited time to attempt a quiz which has a time limit set by assigning them the role of Quiz user with unlimited time.

I've entered quiz grades manually in the 1.9 gradebook. How can I allow students to improve on these grades?

When a grade is entered directly in the gradebook, an "overridden" flag is set, meaning that the grade can no longer be changed from within the quiz.

However, the flag can be removed by turning editing on in the grader report, then clicking the edit grade icon, unchecking the overridden box and saving the changes.

How can I enable email notification of quiz submissions?

See Quiz submission email notification.

Why doesn't Questions per page work like I expect?

Show page breaks

Moodle gives you a lot of flexibility in relation to how your quiz is laid out. You can move questions around and control exactly where the page breaks come. However, this is not really clear unless you turn on the 'Show page breaks' check-box at the bottom-left of the quiz editing page.

Therefore, when you change the 'Questions per page' setting one the quiz settings form, Moodle does not immediately repaginate your quiz. If it did, then it might overwrite your manual changes to the quiz layout.

To actually change the current layout of the quiz, you need to first turn on the 'Show page breaks' option, and then use the repaginate control.

The effect that 'Questions per page' does have is that when you add new questions to the quiz, it automatically inserts page breaks to keep the new questions paginated as you ask. Also, when the 'Shuffle questions' option is on, the questions are split into pages according to the Questions per page option after they have been shuffled.

We are aware that this is a very confusing user interface (and that is putting it politely!) This is being sorted out for Moodle 2.0.

Why can't people (guests) take a quiz without creating an account and logging in?

This is difficult to implement for technical reason.

To explain: The quiz has to link all information about an attempt to a particular 'user' record in the database, and each user can only have one open quiz attempt at a time. All not-logged-in users share the same 'guest' user database record. Therefore, two guests could not attempt the quiz at the same time, and even if they could, it would be difficult to prevent one guest seeing another guest's attempts.

Of course, given enough work, it would be possible to change some of those assumptions, and so make it possible for guests to attempt quizzes. Indeed, some of the obstructions to implementing this have already been removed while doing other work on the quiz, but there is still some way to go.

If you would like to see this implemented, please vote for MDL-17892.

Can you explain the error The number of random questions required is more than are still available in the category!

Review your quiz and verify Moodle has enough questions from each category of questions it will be pulling from. You may have inadvertently selected more questions than what exists in the category. Also make sure your not pulling questions from a category that has zero questions. Because you are picking random questions, rather than a specific question, it may not be apparent at first that you have run out of questions to ask!

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