Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by EMILEE MOORE -
Number of replies: 10

Hi,

We have a course made up of QuizPorts made from Hot Pot activities. Students are able to attempt each activity as many times as they want. We have not set any pre- or post-conditions.

The problem we are experiencing is: Students take a look at activities, "give up", go back, complete it, look at it again the next day, etc. etc. and each time their "abandoned" attempts are bringing down their average grade.

I have just worked out how to delete abandoned attempts from the QuizPort index manually. My question is whether there is any way to set the grading so that only completed attempts contribute to the overall grade (something like a Total (complete) option, similar to the Last (complete) one available)? Or would setting pre- and post-conditions help us in anyway to avoid this problem?

Thanks so much for your help!

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In reply to EMILEE MOORE

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hello Emilee,
could I just check something. Am I right in thinking that you are suggesting a new quiz scoring method of "Average (completed)"? It sounds useful.

Remember that such a quiz scoring method would also ignore non-zero abandoned quiz attempts. Maybe a student could answer all but one question, and quit the quiz with a non-zero score, say 60%, but without completing. Is it OK with you to ignore that attempt?

Perhaps what you would really like is Average (excluding 0% abandoned attempts)?

Perhaps we could add this switch to all scoring methods ...
  • Scoring method: [ Highest / Average / First / Last ]
    ticked checkbox exclude abandoned attempts with a score of 0%
Would that work for you?
Gordon

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In reply to EMILEE MOORE

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Marius Pretorius -
I also have the same problem. I often get learners with an immediately abandoned attempt. I wondered if that happens when they double-click on an quiz link instead of just clicking once. Would that result in an abandoned attempt?

Another problem that I have is that learners do not complete a quiz, but it is counted as one of their attempts. IOW if I allow two attempts and a learner abandones the first attempt and does not complete the second attempt, they have 'used up' their two attempts and cannot repeat the quiz.

Is there a way for the learner to return to the incompleted attempt? Another question I have is how does Moodle determine that an attempt was abandoned and when it is incomplete?

Anyway, I have drifted slightly off topic. Let me get back to your question Emilee. As you can gather from Gordon's response, that feature that you are requesting does not yet exist. He likes your idea and it might be implemented in a future release. What you can do for the moment is to just set the grading method to 'Highest Grade' instead of 'Average Grade'. The incompleted and abandoned attempts will have no bearing on their score.

Regards
Marius
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In reply to Marius Pretorius

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Marius,
thanks for your thoughts.

> Another problem that I have is that learners do not complete a quiz,
> but it is counted as one of their attempts.

So for you, the "Attempts allowed" setting means "Completed attempts"? Generally people use this setting to do a kind of test on the students. But if you let them do a lot of incomplete or abandoned attempts at quiz then they have a good chance to get to see what the questions are, work out their answers and then get 100% on the first completed attempt. It defeats the purpose of this setting. In my mind anyway.

> Is there a way for the learner to return to the incompleted attempt?

In theory yes, but at the moment it is not possible to resume attempts at Hot Potatoes quizzes, because in order to do so we would have to store the exact state of the quiz and recreate that in the browser for the student to continue. Since Hot Potatoes quizzes create a lot of the content in the browser itself, it is far from trivial to set up the browser in the same state.

However having said that, QuizPort was designed with the resumption of HP quiz attempts as a long term goal, so it has the facilities to store the quiz state information which can be used at a later date to resume HP quiz attempts. The state information would be stored as XML in the quizport_details table. By default the current QuizPort module, does not store this information because it takes up a lot of room in the database and cannot be used at present.

> Another question I have is how does Moodle determine that an attempt
> was abandoned and when it is incomplete?

QuizPort has four states for a quiz:
  • in progress
  • timed out
  • abandoned
  • completed
HP quizzes are only "completed" if the correct answer to every question has been found. While the student is doing the quiz it is "in progress". If they timer expires it becomes "timed out". If they leave the quiz for any reason before the quiz is "completed" or "timed out", then the quiz is marked "abandoned".

One further status may be used when I can implement the resumption of HP quizzes:
  • paused
However, as I explained above this is not implemented yet.

Hope that helps spread a little light on the situation

best regards
Gordon


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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Marius Pretorius -
Hello Gordon

Thank you, for your detailed reply. It does indeed shed a lot of light on the topic, not only a little. I understand much better what the complication is with HP quizzes and why they do not behave as native Moodle quizzes.

It is just strange to me that after students have left a HP quiz the status is sometimes indicated as 'abandoned' and at other times 'in progress'. The status doesn't always change to 'abandoned' as one would expect it to.

Regards
Marius
Attachment inprogress_abandoned.jpg
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In reply to Marius Pretorius

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Marius,

> It is just strange to me that after students have left a HP quiz
> the status is sometimes indicated as 'abandoned'

I think the example you cite is from the HotPot module, is it not? The HotPot module cannot detect when a user navigates away from a page, or just closes the browser and switches off the computer. In such a case, no information is sent back to Moodle and the status remains at "in progress" long after the students have packed up, gone home and gone to bed. HotPot does its best to save as uptodate a version of the state as possible by continually sending the results back to Moodle every time a button is clicked However, this has the downside of producing a lot of network traffic.

The QuizPort module , on the other hand, is smarter. It does not send results on every click because it can detect when students try to leave a quiz that has not been finished. Indeed it will display a warning message and ask the student to confirm that they really want to abandon the attempt. If the message is confirmed, the results so far are returned to Moodle and the status of the quiz attempt is set to abandoned.

Note that the QuizPort *unit* attempt remains in progress, so if students resume the *unit* attempt, they will usually resume from the beginning of the quiz that they abandoned, or maybe the one before it, depending on the post-conditions of the abandoned quiz.

regards
Gordon

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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Marius Pretorius -
Hello Gordon,

You are right - I am citing an example from the HotPot module. With all the added features of the QuizPort module - which really sound brilliant - it sounds like I will have to install and implement it approve.

Thanks
Marius
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In reply to Gordon Bateson

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Gerry Bolger -
Gordon
Ive read this with interest as I've noticed a significant number of 'abandoned' HotPot quizzes in the work I am doing. Several students have commented and I assumed they hadn't completed. I also did not realise that abandoned quizzes maybe affecting scores.

Would you suggest we use QuizPort rather than or with HotPot Quizzes... have I understood this tread correctly?
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In reply to Gerry Bolger

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Gerry,

> Would you suggest we use QuizPort rather than or with HotPot Quizzes

Sorry but I don't quite understand your question. I think you are asking whether I suggest using the QuizPort module or the HotPot module, to which I would respond by suggesting you use QuizPort module.

If you are worried about abandoned attempts bringing down grades, then I suggest you don't use average scores or average grades. In my experience using averages can be discouraging to students, because the more attempts they have, the more difficult it becomes to improve on their score or grade.

If you do not use average grades then you needn't worry about abandoned attempts.

regards
Gordon
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In reply to Marius Pretorius

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by EMILEE MOORE -

Dear Gordon, dear Marius,

Thanks for such fast replies!

Perhaps we could add this switch to all scoring methods ...
Scoring method: [ Highest / Average / First / Last ]
ticked checkbox exclude abandoned attempts with a score of 0%

That sounds geat! It would definitely be an improvement fo us.

For now I will try what Marius suggests, setting the grading method to 'Highest Grade' and see if that makes it easier for the teacher to manage than deleting all attempts with a 0% score.

Thanks again!

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In reply to EMILEE MOORE

Re: Any way not to count abandoned attempts in grades?

by Gordon Bateson -
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Dear Emilee,
thank for confirming the suggested improvement. I will try to incorporate that in due course

kind regards
Gordon

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