Timed Quiz Issue

Timed Quiz Issue

by Dean Lennard -
Number of replies: 1

Hey,

I have recently been trying to use the modole timed quiz on a moodle 2 implementation.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or if its expected behaviour i have had a quick look through the tracker but was unable to find anything related to this issue with a moodle 2.

Essentially when a student starts a timed quiz the count down begins and hte student can go through anser questions etc, but if the user navigates away from the quiz using the back button or even the bredcumb and then clicks to continue the quiz the timer starts from the begining i search the tracker and found that in 1.9 there was a similar issue that said says the timer is store server side anway and the student wouldn't actually get any extra time we have tested to check if this was the case in moodle 2 but it's not, for example in the tutor screen you can clearly see that the student spent and hour and 20 minutes on the quiz when the time limit for that quiz was an hour!

This obviously causes some issues in that our acrediting body would disallow these quizzes due to them not timing the students accuratly.

Can you advise on if this is a known issue, already fixed in a newer version etc.

 

Thanks

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In reply to Dean Lennard

Re: Timed Quiz Issue

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

The issue is only with the browser back button. The timer will start at the correct time remaining if you use any navigation.

The difficulty with enforcing the time limit on the server is that the server is may be overloaded - particularly when a big quiz ends and lots of students click submit at the same time - and so the student's Submit all and finish may sit in a queue for some time, even if they submitted on time. Therefore, you have to have some slack built into the time-limit enforcement. Moodle 2.1 is more slack than Moodle 2.0, because I would rather err on the side of not throwing away valid submissions.

As you saw, you can see clearly in the Moodle UI how long the student took to submit, so it is not like students can cheat and get away with it.

I am currently working on http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Better_handling_of_overdue_quiz_attempts for Moodle 2.3, which will improve matters from where they are now.

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