We have been running quizzes using Moodle (v.1.9) for over three years with vast numbers of students and staff. Over the years we have encountered a wide variety of student behaviour during quiz attempts that have caused a range of different problems.
One of the persistent issues we experience is students' ability to go over time i.e. the quiz attempt is recorded as taking 53 minutes when the quiz time limit is 50. While we are not confident we have identified every reason for this we have a number of scenarios that seem to explain most cases. Using the browser back button, opening multiple browser tabs and/or windows being a few prime candidates.
We have recently upgraded to v.2.3 and we were excited about the quiz having had an overhaul. We just ran a quiz for over 300 students and once again some students have managed to go over the alloted time limit - 50mins. I was hopeful that the new settings that allows an open attempt to be submitted would help us get around some of the 'quiz attempt has gone over time' issues. It was not uncommon for students (in v.1.9) to have saved (but not submitted) their questions, exited the quiz only to return a day later open the quiz which they thought they had submitted and for their attempt to be sent and graded zero as they were well over the allocated time limit. Forcing submission of open attempts in v.2.3 I thought would pretty much eliminate this from happening. The latest quiz has shown that the dreaded overtime scenario still exists. Although the details of what the student did during his attempt is sketchy it does seem he had multiple browser tabs open and was doing things like navigating the Moodle site in which the quiz was launched from while in another tab his quiz attempt was open. The quiz was set to submit open attempt with no grace period.
I realise my question is unlikely to get a definitve answer, but I wonder if there is a single reason that would explain the overtime scenario? Alternatively, maybe there are some tactics that other people have employed to assist in reducing/eliminating the number of cases whereby quiz attempts have gone over? I have a number of lecturers who are very frustrated about having to make judgement calls on whether a student should receive marks for quizzes that have gone overtime. It is not uncommon that in every quiz taken (and we run hundreds each week) that there is up to 5% of attempts for each quiz that have gone overtime. For class of a 1000 students, 5% results in a lot of work and loss of confidence in the integrity of running assessments in this way.
Somewhat related to the above is the question about questions being saved. One of things that we found in v.1.9 was that when a quiz was broken over multiple pages some students decided to open up each page in a different browser window or tab and answer questions in each tab. This behaviour resulted in some very odd adding up of scores and lost answers. Some of our staff then reverted to having all questions on one page as it was just too hard relying on students to read instructions not to open multiple tabs. While in v.1.9 there was the save button at the bottom of the page which we encouraged students to use regularly, in v.2.3 this save button has gone. Apart from splitting the quiz questions over multiple pages, which we encourage staff to do, but which some steadfastly refuse to do due to previous bad experiences, how do we encourage students to save their question answers as they go given there is no save button? It does seem rather odd to ask them to click on the next button, which takes them to an overview page, as a means of saving. Also, it is my understanding that unless a student does something like hit the next button then answers are not sent to the Moodle server. Simply there is no automated send of answers that happens in the background? I have seen some talk about using ajax (??) to send information back to the server on a regular basis but it seems this solution creates additional issues.
Sorry for the length of this post and if the answers to these questions have already been posted. I did trawl the forum posts for some time to see if I could find answers but with no luck.
Duncan