Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Amir Elion -
Number of replies: 7
I am writing you as we would appreciate some advice regarding a development we need to do for Moodle quiz (Moodle 2.3+).
We have a project for which users do an offline quiz, made up of separate "chapters" or sections. The quiz is usually filled on a paper answers sheet (such as the SAT quizzes answers sheet).
Students would need to type their answers in on a form of in Moodle, and get the results of those quiz sections counted and evaluated on the Moodle course, with each section calculated in itself.
We have considered the right way to approach this and are thinking of this implementation:
  1. Use Moodle's regular question bank to build the questions (MC only are used)
  2. Use Moodle quiz to build each section of the exam in a quiz activity, and place those in a course section not visible to students
  3. Develop a new module that will define a form for the students answer sheet. In the form settings the teacher will choose the quizzes (e.g. chapters) that will be included for the student to answer. This form only has to show the chapter number, the question number and the answers numbers, for students to choose from and submit. It would have a graphical representation of a standard SAT-like MC answer sheet. Students can either click the answer number below the question number or type in 1-4 in a text box below the answers numbers.
  4. We would probably also need to develop report to show the augmented results of the separate "chapters" so to calculate the weighted fina result of the quizzes included in this answer sheet.
I would appreciate your comments on the suggested approach and any suggestions on how to implement, and things we should pay attention to.
 
Thanks,
Amir
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Amir Elion

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

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

Why do you want to get the students to answer the questions on the computer, but with a user-interface and un-friendly as a SAT sheet?

Why not use the Moodle quiz properly, and present the full text of the quetsion and the choices to the student on-screen?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Amir Elion -

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the answer.

The site is supposed to prepare the students for the pen and paper test. So we need to mimic that quiz feel.

Also, student do a number of the exercises offline in exercise books and just need to feed in their answers quickly without seeing the qutsion or answers texts - just the numbers, and get feedback and evaluation of their success after submitting.

Another thing is that different sections of the same quiz (the "chapters") need to have different weight for assement, and each chapter has to be seperated in the assement (so you can see how you did on chpater 1, on chpater 2, chapter 3, as well as a total weighted score).

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Amir Elion

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Kyle Temkin -

Interestingly enough, I've been working on and off for about a year on a project that may provide a good amount of useful code for your project.

Towards the beginning of the year, I began development on a paper quiz plug-in for Moodle, which allows students to take offline quizzes which take advantage of Moodle's randomization and automatic grading. 

Currently, it works as follows:

  1. The instructor uses a quiz report to generate a collection of "quiz attempts" which are not associated with any particular user. (Technically, these are actually Question Usage By Activities- the "core" of a quiz attempt without any particular question data).
  2. The system automatically generates a zip archive with a single PDF for each of the generated quiz "attempts"; and the instructor prints the whole batch for use in class. 
  3. The students take the exams using scantron-style forms; and our scantron machine parses those forms into Excel/CSV summaries of the responses.
  4. The instructor uploads the CSV onto Moodle, and Moodle automatically converts the responses into true Moodle quiz attempts. The instructors (and students, if enabled) can then view the results of their quiz as if it was taken on Moodle.

I've used these for a few exams in a variety of classes- and they've worked really well. The current system is still kind of rough- it only works for multiple-choice questions, and I haven't used it since 2.2- so it may need some porting to work with 2.3.

Here's a link to the source:

https://github.com/bumoodle/moodle-quiz_papercopy (pure-PHP branch)
https://github.com/bumoodle/moodle-quiz_papercopy/tree/WIP_WEBKIT_RENDER (faster branch which uses wkhtmltopdf)

Both of the above require the quizsync library: 

https://github.com/bumoodle/moodle-local_quizsync 

In particular, you may want to look at the enter_scrantron_responses function (line 619), which parses a list of multiple-choice style responses (e.g. 1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2...) as though they were answers to multiple-choice questions.

(Hopefully, when I have time, I'll finish smoothing the rough edges from my paper copy plugin, and submit it contrib.)

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Kyle Temkin

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

I should have thought the "scantron machine" was a technology of the past.wink

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Kyle Temkin -

I'd love it if it were- that would mean that I finally had access to a computer lab large enough to fit 110+ students at once wink.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Kyle Temkin

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Hello Kyle,

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I think it can help me a lot.

My university don't use Scantron machines but we use scanners and QCM-DIRECT software (from french firm Neoptec) and I had a long term project to do exactly the same thing (permit students to see their results in Moodle), with the added feature that QCM Direct is able to import and export both quiz and quiz results as xml documents.

I think your code will save me a lot of time.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Kyle Temkin

Re: Developing an answer sheet for multiple quiz submission

by Juergen Zimmer -

Dear Kyle and others,


interesting to hear about your version of offline quizzes! Tim Hunt just pointed me to this thread and asked me to inform you about a similar development at the University of Vienna.

We've just implemented a Moodle 2.2. version of our offlinequiz module which for a similar task. In the past few weeks we've heavily bug-fixed the module after it went productive beginning of September. We are planning to publish the module to the Moodle community in the coming months.

Just a short description of the module's functionality:

 - The teacher can edit offline quizzes (with an interface very similar to online quizzes) and add description question, multichoice questions and multichoiceset questions (all or nothing).

 - They can edit different question sets for up to 6 groups.

 - They can also activate shufflequestions and shuffleanswers for the offline quiz s.t. questions/answers are automatically shuffled for each group.

 - The teacher creates PDF documents containing the questions and separate (standardised) PDF documents for the answers (boxes to cross, see attached screenshot). Once the documents are created the order or the questions and answers for each group is fixed in the question engine and the question sets can no longer be edited.

 - The students cross the boxes during the offline quiz and the answer forms are scanned with a standard (high-speed) scanner.

 - The scanned forms are uploaded to the offlinequiz module and automatically evaluated by our own PHP code (which is a bit inefficient...)

 - The teacher can correct evaluation errors in a customised interface.

 - The teacher can decide whether or not the students can see the scanned forms (images) and the crosses that have been recognised during the offlinequiz review (see screenshot).

Maybe the module be interesting for some of you. But please be patient, I can't tell when we will publish the module since this will lead to additional support, and first I have to make the module more customisable.

Cheers

   Juergen

Attachment screenshot_023.jpeg
Average of ratings: -