Removing a Question in a Quiz

Removing a Question in a Quiz

by Philip Zablocki -
Number of replies: 4

Im having a problem removing a quiz question. Ive figured out that once people have taken the quiz, and results are recorded, it is not possible to remove a question from that quiz.

I had to delete all the attemps that people have made in order to remove the specific question.

Is there anyway to be able to remove a question from a quiz that people have already taken?

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In reply to Philip Zablocki

Re: Removing a Question in a Quiz

by Dean Thayer -
I think it's just designed to be impossible to remove a question after the quiz has been taken. Why do you need to remove it?
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In reply to Dean Thayer

Re: Removing a Question in a Quiz

by Philip Zablocki -

Its pretty common actually..

Its difficult to predict how people will respond to a specific question...

so if u have a question which was done very poorly in general (maybe because of the wording in the question itself), its usually better to pull the whole question than make everyone suffer.

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In reply to Philip Zablocki

Re: Removing a Question in a Quiz

by Tim Hunt -
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What you can do in this situation is to change the scores for each question, so that bad question contributes 0 to the final test score. (Then regrade the quiz.)

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Removing a Question in a Quiz

by John Antolak -
Another suggestion is to edit the "bad" question right in the quiz. Moodle does not stop you from editing the questions while the quiz is open, it just won't let you change the quiz. In addition to changing the scoring, as Tim suggests, you can change the text to something like "Please move on to the next question, this one does not count", and change the responses to generic placeholders. That would make sure that students don't get bogged down trying to answer the bad question before moving on to the rest of the quiz. You might even change the name of the question to something like "DO NOT USE" or change the question category similarly, so that you don't pick it next time by accident.

One caveat is that this will change the question in the question bank. Therefore, if you want to keep the question (make it better for future quizzes), you might want to edit twice, using Moodle's capability to save your edits as a new question before making the above changes.

If the quiz is still open, you can also "fix" the question, but then you have to worry about how to deal with attempts that have already been made or are in progress. Whether this is a good option depends on how many attempts have been made and what the goals of the quiz and/or class are.
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