Quiz

Thank you very much indeed, Harry and Harry's colleague.

I am using your questiontype.php and the theme that Harry tested so it is pretty strange.

But you have done far more than I could expect. Thank you very much indeed.

Timothy

Hi Jeff!, thanks for taking the time for a detailed response to my rant about "overexplaining" in quiz directions!

Normally I quite agree that one never explains too much, and I also spend a lot of time making sure that everything is clear in my instructions to the students.

I use a lot the "title" attribute and, like you, I lament its poor implementation in Mozilla (truncated, no line break, etc.). I agree that it would be nice to be able to use a more elaborate pop-up system, like the OverLib popup. Unfortunately, because main-core Moodle stubbornly refuses teachers the right to use Javascript in our courses, we can't use OverLib.

Finally I have found a work-around - as you suggest - for hiding unwanted "prompt" in quiz questions, but only in forthcoming version 1.6. But more of that when 1.6 becomes the standard version.

Joseph

Dear Gustav,

1- It is unfortunately difficult to get things right for all audiences.

How true, and you are making a very good job of this impossible task, as regards the Quiz module, Gustav!

2- The reason Moodle 1.6 says "Choose one answer" or "Choose at least one answer" is that this was a feature request by someone who was concerned that students would not know the difference between checkboxes and radio buttons and would need this extra hint to know when they could choose more than one answer.

Well, an easy answer for that would be for that teacher to introduce her quiz with an explanatory screen making this difference clear.

3- Because everyone has different requirements the questions in Moodle 1.6 are using templates, simple html files that determine the layout.To get rid of the answer prompt you just have to delete the lines etc.

That is excellent. However, we must never forget that some of us are teaching in huge institutions (where I work we have 20,000 students) where the Moodle site is in the hands of admin, and making such a "simple" change to our installed Moodle php code is quite out of question for two reasons: a) admin (especially computer people) are very much against hacking anything if they can avoid it and b) such a change would affect all courses site-wide and would require agreement of a majority of users (a nightmare...).

Once more may I say that what is needed in Moodle is to have more control over such things at teacher level, not at admin level. I have pointed this out many times in my posts, but I must be one of a tiny fraction of Moodle users wanting this, so...

All the best,

Joseph

PS As I said in my previous post, I have found a workaround to get rid of unwanted prompt, using the CSS in a theme (for version 1.6). I'm waiting for 1.6 to stabilize before posting the workaround (if anyone wants it).

Great. The template feature alone will make upgrading to a stable 1.6 worthwhile. Will the template concept be extended to the layout of blocks and lists, too?
Regards, Klaus

I've had a student raise an issue (and some of our faculty seem to agree) that the language used on multiple choice questions with multiple answers allowed (checkboxes) can be misleading to students. The current phrasing tells the student to "check at least one"; however, really we are asking the student to "check all that apply". The argument as it was stated to me was that the student followed directions by checking at least one answer. He knew others were correct; however, he checked one of the correct answers and still lost points. I believe that I can change this by changing the language string; however, I wanted to throw this out to the larger Moodle community for consideration. What is it that we really want the student to do? I tend to agree that we want the student to "check all that apply" rather than "check at least one".  Perhaps a combo is needed, to avoid the situation where a student might believe that it is possible to have a correct answer where none of the options should be checked. In reality, we want the student to check at least one and all others that may apply. Any thoughts?

Because everyone has different requirements the questions in Moodle 1.6 are using templates, simple html files that determine the layout. The one for the multiple choice questions is in question/type/multichoice/display.html. To get rid of the answer prompt you just have to delete the lines

  <div class="prompt">
    <?php echo $answerprompt; ?>
  </div>

I'm trying to get rid of the answer prompt as wel. I have deleted the lines from the file as mentioned above. No result. Whatever I change in this file, nothing will change on the screen. When I rename the file, the question disappears from the screen. When I delete all the code in the file, the screen remains the same. This is driving me crazy.  Can anybody point me in the right direction? I'm using the latest Moodle version 1.9.

Bert