Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Tim Hunt -
Number of replies: 6
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This is MDL-3030, the most voted-for Moodle quiz bug. (See http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL#selectedTab=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project%3Apopularissues-panel for the list of all issues with most votes.)

I think I have finally devised a solution, which I have written up here: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Better_handling_of_overdue_quiz_attempts. I am afraid there is not time to implement this for Moodle 2.2, but it will be done in pleny of time for Moodle 2.3. (The OU want me to get this done during November.)

So please help by scrutinising my plans, and spoting anything I might have overlooked.

The design document is rather technical, so here are a couple of scenarios for how it might work:

Example 1: a mid-term quiz. Students must complete the quiz and submit before midnight Friday 21st October. When time expires, if a student has not started, they cannot do anything. If a student has stared an attempt, but forgotten to go back and finish it, then early on Saturday morning, Moodle sends the student an email saying "You started an attempt at the mid-term quiz which was due on Friday 21st October, but you did not submit it. You are no longer allowed to change any of your answers, but if you wish to have it graded, you may still go to {this link} and submit it up until Wednesday 26th October."

Example 2: a three-hour exam. When time expires, if they are still working, the student is automatically redirected to the summary page. There, they can do a final review for up to 10 minutes after the exam ends. (This is like the way to stay in the exam hall and sort out the paper-work after them mian exam time expires. This means that Moodle does not have to mark all the quiz attempts at exactly the same second.)

Example 3: five-minute pop-quiz. When time expires, the quiz is automatically submitted, as at present.

I hope those three examples make the more detailed description easier to comprehend.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Phil Butcher -

You ask if we should allow abandoning without submitting. That sounds dangerous to me - in the sense of users abandoning unintentionally. You would have to have an 'are you sure/really sure' interchange and as such you may as well just go through the normal submit and restart.

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In reply to Phil Butcher

Re: Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Tim Hunt -
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This is the view I am coming around to. Particularly as it is perfectly possible to implement everything else in the proposal without this bit, and then easy to add the extra button later.

Therefore, I think we don't add this bit of UI uless a demand for it arises.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Henning Bostelmann -
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Hi Tim

According to your plans, a manual action will be required (on the side of the student or the teacher) for submitting the stored attempt after the deadline.

What's the rationale behind this? Would it not be simpler if the attempt would just be "Submit All&Finish"ed autmatically by cron, during or after the grace period?

We usually use "adaptive mode" quizzes. Here the students will already have received their score, or some right/wrong feedback, during the question attempt. Some of them forget to click "Submit All & Finish" in the end. (Sometimes they misunderstand the system; sometimes they meant to return to improve on some questions, and then forget about it.) If we count these overdue attempts automatically, no harm is done - there seems to be no disadvantage to the student. If however they fail to act on the reminder e-mail you propose, they'll get 0 for the entire quiz, although they got some results correct - just for some formal reason. Evidently they'll be disgruntled. If we leave the submission of overdue attempt to the teacher, then the teacher will be disgruntled (since they need to additional formal tasks that seem meaningless).

But maybe I'm missing something?

Henning

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In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Tim Hunt -
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Thank you for taking the time to review the plans.

 

This is something we had a long debate over at the OU.

From looking in our database, we could see that sometimes, a student would start a quiz attempt, and look at all the questions, but then not answer any of them, or just answer one or two. That is, it appears they would decide that the quiz was not a valuable use of their time.

In this case, we, and this includes some fairly senior people who are involved in setting our Exams and Assessment policy, felt strongly that it would be wrong to automatically submit these attempts, and assign the students a grade of 0. The student should have the option not to submit, even if they had started.

We also felt that, it is the students responsibilty to hand in their work if they want it to counts. We will do everything we can to help them remember to submit, but we won't actually do it for them.

 

However, once all the other code is in place, it would very easy to do automatic submission, so we could make that an option for the teacher. I expect we will do that if the Grace period is very small.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Geoffrey Brewster -

Tim,

I would vote for letting the teacher decide whether to submit the quizzes for students. I support professors who teach very large classes >700 students. If even a small percentage fail to click the last button (and this happens no matter what directions you throw at them), it becomes a big pain to answer all the complaining emails.

I would very much like to have the following options for auto submission:

  • No auto submission
  • No auto submission but notify student to submit
  • Allow teacher (or whoever else you want to give this permission to) to submit on case-by-case basis. This should include a method for checking all unsubmitted attempts on a report page
  • Automatically submit all unsubmitted attempts

All of these options should be available both for the quizzes using the timer or for quizzes that are unsubmitted past the closing date. If there is an interim step, I would like to see a page that allows teachers and others to submit on a case-by-case basis.

The other thing that would be nice is for these same options to be available for Moodle Lessons. We have also had problems with lack of submission for them in large classes as well. However, I have not tested this too much in Moodle 2.X

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Dealing with over-due quiz attempts

by Tim Hunt -
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Just to say that I have started work on this.

Based on thinking about this since I wrote the spec, I tweaked the proposal slighly. I think the changes make sense, and respond to some of the comments that were made here.

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