Quiz settings

How to Create a Quiz

Moodle quizzes have two major components, the quiz body and the question pools. Think of the quiz bodies as a container for various types of questions pulled from the question pools. The body is what students see when they take the assessment. It also defines how the students interact with the quiz. The questions in a quiz body can be of any type, chosen manually or at random, and displayed in either a set order or a random order. The question pools can contain questions arranged in a manner which makes sense to you. You can create pools based on chapters, weeks in the semester, important concepts or any other organizational scheme. Pools can be reused in multiple quizzes, shared between classes, and moved between systems.

Name/Introduction

These are the descriptive fields in your quiz. In the Name field, write the name of the quiz that you wish it to be identified by. In the Introduction field, write the description of the quiz that students will see before attempting the quiz.

Open/Close the quiz

You can specify times when the quiz is accessible for people to make attempts. Before the opening time, and after the closing time, the quiz will be unavailable.

Time limit

By default, quizzes do not have a time limit, which allows students as much time as they need to complete the quiz. If you do specify a time limit, several things are done to try and ensure that quizzes are completed within that time:

1. Javascript support in the browser becomes mandatory - this allows the timer to work correctly.
2. A floating timer window is shown with a countdown
3. When the timer has run out, the quiz is submitted automatically with whatever answers have been filled in so far
4. If a student manages to cheat and spends more than 60 seconds over the allotted time then the quiz is automatically graded zero

Questions per page

For longer quizzes it makes sense to stretch the quiz over several pages by limiting the number of questions per page. When adding questions to the quiz, page breaks will automatically be inserted according to the setting you choose here. However, you will also be able to move page breaks around by hand later on the editing page.

Shuffle questions

If you enable this option, then the order of questions in the quiz will be randomly shuffled each time a student attempts the quiz. This is not related to the use of Random Questions, this is only about the displayed order of questions. The intention is to make it a little harder for students to copy from each other.

Shuffle answers

If you enable this option, then the order of answers within each question will be randomly shuffled each time a student attempts this quiz. Of course, this only applies to questions that have multiple answers displayed, such as Multiple Choice or Matching Questions. The intention is simply to make it a little harder for students to copy from each other. This option is not related to the use of Random Questions.

Attempts allowed

Students may be allowed to have multiple attempts at a quiz. This can help make the process of taking the quiz more of an educational activity rather than simply an assessment.

Each attempt builds on the last

If multiple attempts are allowed and this setting is set to Yes, then each new attempt contains the results of the previous attempt. This allows a quiz to be completed over several attempts. To show a fresh quiz on every attempt, select No for this setting.

Grading method

When multiple attempts are allowed, there are different ways you can use the grades to calculate the student's final grade for the quiz.

• Highest grade - the final grade is the highest (best) grade in any attempt
• Average grade - the final grade is the average (simple mean) grade of all attempts
• First grade - the final grade is the grade gained on the first attempt (other attempts are ignored)
• Last grade - the final grade is the grade gained on the most recent attempt only

Adaptive mode

If you choose Yes for this option then the student will be allowed multiple responses to a question even within the same attempt at the quiz. So for example if the student's response is marked as incorrect the student will be allowed to try again immediately. However a penalty will usually be subtracted from the students score for each wrong attempt (the amount of penalty is determined by the penalty factor, set by the next option).

This mode also allows adaptive questions that can change themselves in response to a student's answer. Here is how the IMS QTI specification defines adaptive questions (items):

An adaptive item is an item that adapts its appearance, its scoring (Response Processing) or both in response to each of the candidate's attempts. For example, an adaptive item may start by prompting the candidate with a box for free-text entry but, on receiving an unsatisfactory answer, present a simple choice interaction instead and award fewer marks for subsequently identifying the correct response. Adaptivity allows authors to create items for use in formative situations which both help to guide candidates through a given task while also providing an outcome that takes into consideration their path

In adaptive mode an additional Submit button is shown for each question. If the student presses this button then the response to that particular question is submitted to be scored and the mark achieved is displayed to the student. If the question is an adaptive question then it is displayed in its new state that takes the student's answer into account and will in many cases ask the student for another input. In the simplest adaptive questions this new state may differ only in the feedback text and prompt the student to try again; in more complicated question also the question text and even the interaction elements can change.

Apply penalties

If a quiz is run in adaptive mode then a student is allowed to try again after a wrong response. In this case you may want to impose a penalty for each wrong response to be subtracted from the final mark for the question. The amount of penalty is chosen individually for each question when setting up or editing the question.

This setting has no effect unless the quiz is run in adaptive mode.

Decimal points

By using this setting you can select the number of decimals to be showed in the grade of every attempt.

Students may review

This option controls whether and when students will be able to review their past attempts at this quiz.

Students may review (see) their own responses, scores for their responses, feedback from the teacher (if any) or answers (correct answers) immediately after the attempt, later but while the quiz is still open or after even the quiz is closed.

Currently, the setting "students can see answers" works differently depending on the question type in a particular quiz. If the question type used is 'matching' then students get to see which of their responses are in fact correct answers. If the question type used is 'short answer' then students see their responses plus all correct answers to all questions.

Show quiz in a "secure" window

The "secure" window tries to provide a little more security for quizzes (making copying and cheating more difficult) by restricting some of the things that students can do with their browsers.

What happens is that:

1. Javascript is made a requirement.
2. The quiz appears in a new fullscreen window.
3. Some mouse actions on the text are prevented.
4. Some keyboard commands are prevented.

NOTE: This security is NOT watertight. Do NOT rely on these protections as your sole strategy. It is impossible to implement complete protection of quizzes in a web environment so please do not rely on this option if you are really worried about students cheating. Other strategies you can try are to create really large databases of questions from which you randomly choose questions, or even better, rethink your overall assessment to put more value on constructive forms of activity such as forum discussions, glossary building, wiki writing, workshops, assignments etc.

Require password

This field is optional.

If you specify a password in here then participants must enter the same password before they are allowed to make an attempt on the quiz.

Require network address

This field is optional.

You can restrict access for a quiz to particular subnets on the LAN or Internet by specifying a comma-separated list of partial or full IP address numbers. This is especially useful for a proctored quiz, where you want to be sure that only people in a certain room are able to access the quiz. For example: 192.168. , 231.54.211.0/20, 231.3.56.211

There are three types of numbers you can use (you can not use text based domain names like example.com):

1. Full IP addresses, such as 192.168.10.1 which will match a single computer (or proxy).
2. Partial addresses, such as 192.168 which will match anything starting with those numbers.
3. CIDR notation, such as 231.54.211.0/20 which allows you to specify more detailed subnets.

Spaces are ignored.

Visible to students

You can also decide on whether or not the quiz will be seen by the students. You can hide the activity from students selecting "Hide" in the Visible to students field. It is useful if you wouldn't like to make the activity available immediately.