Development:Quiz UI redesign scenarios - Entering questions into an exam

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Unless exams are very simple, teachers often have a natural set of categories to put questions in, from course curriculum or from the actual material of the course. This can be regarded as metadata of actual questions.

A teacher may or may not want to enter question metadata (such as categories) into the application, depending on:

• their confidence (experience) with Moodle or computers in general
• the amount of time available: in a situation where a teacher only has the questions on paper or in some other application and they need to get the exam to the student in 15 minutes
• what they perceive feasible in the application's user interface.

It is also possible that the teacher imports the data from another application, and in this case the metadata may come with the questions; the questions will be in categories in the application after importing.

Fred

• carefully crafted, can't reuse the questions (but may be able to use for reference)

Jack

Depending on how much of a hurry he is in, Jack creates either just exams or first a question bank from which to randomize questions. Even if Jack creates just single questions at first, he benefits from creating the questions in proper thematical categories, since his eventual aim with his question banks is to use those categories in future exams either for single or random questions.

While grading exams, Jack often makes notes about some of the answers students have given to specific questions. When creating new exams, he often uses this information to make slight modifications to those questions or to help him to pick questions for a given exam.

Mary

• designed to test the student's knowledge base on a certain subject

Based on the themes that come from course curriculum, Mary has organized her questions in categories. Under most themes she has subcategories for different difficulty levels and for most a given exam, she usually has about 60% of easier and 40% of mode difficult questions. Since she has a lot (i.e. dozens ... thousands) of questions for each course, she would find it useful to categorize questions based on different criterias – that is, to be capable of tagging questions, as well as searching for particular questions based on their content, tags or other properties.

It would be important to preserve question metadata even when it is exported and imported. Even though her questions are selected randomly from categories exams, she sometimes wants to use questions that have not been seen by students before, to gather data about how well those questions work. She gets feedback about the exam from students, but since she does not use any question types where students could freely type their answers, she has not gotten feedback about exam questions with the exams.