Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Marti Ratcliff -
Number of replies: 14

We are running Moodle 2.3.1+(Build: 20120802).

We had a student who was in the middle of a password protected, 3-hour timed quiz when his course enrollment expired.  The quiz is set for 1 attempt. The quiz was never submitted because the system shut down. The quiz shows a status of "Never Submitted" at this point.

We have extended his enrollment period in order to allow us to submit the quiz, but cannot determine how to access an option to submit the quiz. We have tried extending the time allowed but there is still no option to "continue the attempt" so it can be submitted. If we allow an additional attempt, it just creates a new quiz, so that doesn't help.

I have attached an image of the current settings for your review.

When the student goes back to the quiz, it gives the folloiwng information:

Attempts allowed: 1
To attempt this quiz you need to kow the quiz password
Time limit: 3 hours

Summary of your previous attempts
State                          Review
Never submitted         Review

No more attempts are allowed
Back to the course

The "Review" link at this point allows the student to see the entire exam including his responses. Normally students can only see the review right after submission and only for a very brief period (about 2 minutes). After that they can only review the quiz under proctored conditions so questions are not available to be copied. I have no way of disabling this currently and we now have a compromised quiz.

So we need to know how to "submit the quiz" and how to disable the "review" link.

Any suggestions for resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Attachment settings.jpg
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In reply to Marti Ratcliff

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

You found a bug. It was using the wrong reivew options for quizzes that were "Never submitted". I have reported this as MDL-35744, and sumbitted a fix that should be integrated next week.

Sadly that is the easy bit. At the moment there is no way to retrieve an attempt that was "Never Submitted", and get it back into the "In progress" state. That was intentionally ruled out of scope at the time these changes were being made for Moodle 2.3, but from the various comments we have had in this forum recently, it seems this is necessary functionality, and we must add it. I have created MDL-35745 for this, and I don't know when I will get time to work on it. Let me copy the key bit of what I just wrote there:

The question is, what UI should trigger this. Options include:

1. Do it automatically (cron) when teachers edit the quiz settings, or a group or use override, or add a user to a group with an override, or ... That rapidly gets very complex, but cron already has to deal with it, particularly after we fix MDL-35717.

2. Add a new button at the bottom of Results / Grades report, next to "Regrade selected attempts" and "Delete selected attempts", we could add "Re-open selected attempts". (Of course, it makes no sense to let teachers re-open an attempt if cron will just move it back to Never submitted very soon.)

3. We could make a special new report for re-opening Never submitted attempts, and/or submitting open attempts on behalf of the student, which only shows the applicable buttons for each attempt.

I am not really sure which of these ideas would work best.

So, before we can write the code for this, we need to decide how this should work. Please discuss.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Sam Black -

Can a "usually quiet" member make a suggestion?

Would it be feasible to possibly, with the "Re-open selected attempts" button, send you to the Override page and allow you to enter a change of due date/time to keep the cron from immediately re-closing the attempt?

Just a suggestion.

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In reply to Sam Black

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Marti Ratcliff -

Sam,

One problem we face with our courses is that we run asynchronous courses that are open indefinitely. Students can enroll at any time and have up to 6 months to complete these independent study courses. The quizes to not close until we revise a course. So in effect, there is no "due date" for when a quiz is taken.

Marti

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Marti Ratcliff -

My preference would be #3. This would allow us the flexibility we need to deal with most situations that we have encountered. There are times when we just need to submit a quiz for a student, but there are also times when we need to allow a student to continue an attempt that has been closed.

I always worry about trying to make things happen automatically. There might be an instance when we would not want an attempt automatically submitted.

I would have sworn in a previous version of Moodle that we could allow a student to complete an attempt by just changing the number of attempts. I actually tried this first, but was not given the option to open the previous attempt to complete it. The option was just to start another new attempt.

I assume that the latest update added the new Timing options that now are available in the existing quizzes. I hope that I'm understanding this correctly, so please bear with me as I talk myself through it.

  1. If a student is working on a quiz and they run out of time before they submit the quiz, the system will automatically submit it for them.
  2. If a student has time remaining on the timer and logs out of a quiz without submitting it, there are three possible outcomes, depending on what is selected from the "When time expires" dropdown. From these options, I assume that the timer continues to countdown whether the student is logged in or not once the quiz is started. Is that correct? (I thought the timer stopped, but that may have been in the previous version.)
  3. If a student gets dropped out for some reason, is the attempt automatically submitted when the countdown timer runs out or would it be immediately submitted anytime the student gets bumped out?

I guess I'm confused about how the timer is set up. Does the timer continue to run even if a student logs out and will be returning later to finish? If so, is this new? I thought that we had checked this at one point and when a student loffed out without finishing, the timer stopped. When the student returned to finish the quiz, the timer gave them the remaining time available. We had a problem once with a student being dropped out of an exam due to an internet connection problem and needed to allow them additional time to complete the quiz because some time was used getting back in and connecting with our proctor service.

If we go with option 3 in your post, I believe it would allow us the most flexibility. I am going to have a couple other staff from here read this post and add any additional comments they may have as well.

Thanks for the quick response. I look forward to finding a solution.

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In reply to Marti Ratcliff

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Susan Fleming -

Either #2 or #3 would work for us but in the meantime, there is a work around:

In the Quiz Settings, change the Time Limit to something in the future,  the number of Attempts Allowed to unlimited, and in the question behaviour Each Attempt Builds on Last to yes. 

Login as the student and open and submit the new attempt without changing anything. 

Once done, the settings need changed back and the old attempt deleted.

Not elegant but it does work.

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In reply to Susan Fleming

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Danny De Witte -

I agree, not elegant but it works.

It's also a bit tricky because it just creates a new attempt and now we need the students confirmation/approval that the newly created attempt is exactly the same as the first attempt.

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In reply to Danny De Witte

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Hugo Ribeiro -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Is this valid even if the quiz setting "when times expires" was "There's a grace period when open attempts can be submitted..."?

 

 

 

 

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In reply to Hugo Ribeiro

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by david de leeuw -

Help !! We have 4 students now with this status. What can we do till this bug is fixed ?

David de Leeuw

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In reply to david de leeuw

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Try this:

  1. Work out the ids for the 4 problem attempts. You can get this by going to the quiz reports, and reviewing the 4 attempts. The URL will end .../mod/quiz/review.php?attempt={id here}.
  2. Change the quiz settings to When time expires: attempts are submitted automatically.
  3. (being very careful) edit the data in the database. In the quiz_attempts table, matching the ids with the id column, find the rows for those 4 attempts. Edit the value in the 'state' column from 'abandoned' to 'inprogress'.
  4. Wait until cron runs. The attempts should then be submitted.

I think that will work, but it is just an educated guess. Proceed at your own risk. The sensible thing would be to try this on a test server, with a dummy quiz and attempt you created just for testing, before trying it wilt real data.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by david de leeuw -

We found a simpler method which worked for us:

1. Update the quiz : set the "close the quiz" date after today

2. Set "When time expires" to "There is a grace period ..."

3. Under Grade set "Attempts allowed" to "unlimited"

4. Question behavior: Each attempt builds on the last "Yes"

5. Invite the students who did not close their exams

6. Allow them to start a new attempt, and close it immediately

7. Problem solved .....

 

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In reply to david de leeuw

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Sebastian H. -
Picture of Testers

Thanks for this solution, it works!

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In reply to david de leeuw

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by klebe stift -

We had a requirement that students should only have 1 attempt at the quiz.

Building on your method, ours was:

  1. Wait until the quiz is closed, so no other students may have a second attempt
  2. Set "attempts allowed" to "2"
  3. Set "When time expires" to "open attempts submit automatically"
  4. Set "Each attempt builds on the last" to "yes"
  5. Apply a user override for each student affected, with an extended quiz end date, and a time limit of 10 seconds
  6. Ask the student to re-attempt the quiz, they will have 10 seconds and either they or the quiz will submit the new attempt with little opportunity to change their answers.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Federico Wechsler -

I can confirm this works Tim

I didnt wanna go the other route suggested of creating a second entry that builds onto the first, etc... 

Last step if you want to manually "push" it to update immediately should be: log in as the student and access the quiz page. Otherwise it will show "in progress".

Thanks for your hundreds of posts that have made my life so much easier.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Quiz: How to submit a quiz with "Never Submitted" status

by Ashish Srivastava -

Worked for me.

After changing in database Status as " Finished"  and Adding "Finish Time" its Grading status changed to "Not Yet Graded" . Finally i use "Regrading selected attempt" from front end,

Now finally students Quiz Result could be saved.

Many Thanks Mr. Hunt.

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