Some faculty believe that, in an earlier version (we are at 2.3.3) each quiz answer was saved as soon as it was answered without the student needing to do anything else. I, contrarily, believe it has always been true that the student must also click a button, such as "Next" or "Save without submitting," to prevent answers from being lost if the timer ran out or there was an Internet disconnection before quiz submission. Can anyone settle this argument? It would be nice if each question saved automatically from being triggered by the user action that answered it, but I'm guessing that it was not set up that way because of the extra load this would place on the server.
When Moodle saves what the student entered into a page of the quiz has not fundamentally changed since multi-page quizzes were introduced 7 years ago, around the time of Moodle 1.4. (https://github.com/moodle/moodle/commit/d70ccc495ca904789940f281655b94d9a8e8637b.)
The answers are saved whenever the student clicks on a button (or the link in the quiz navigation to navigate to another page).
You are wrong to say "answers ... being lost if the timer ran out" because when the timer gets to zero, it effectively clicks the Submit all and finish button for the student.
If there is an internet disconnection, then of course the student's responses cannot be sent to the server. However, if the internet connection drops, and then re-connects, while the student is working on one page of the quiz, then no-one would notice. Whether the internet connection is there only matters at the moment when you want to communicate with the server.
Implementing auto-save would be possible, and it would put extra load on the server. Hence it would be a trade-off. It would be nice to have the code as an option.
Then we do have a problem, because all unsaved answers are being lost when the timer runs out. In other words, the timer is not automatically "clicking" the Submit button. I have tested it and this is happening with each of the three possible settings for "When time expires." I have a ticket in with our hosting service who is investigating. Until they can fix it, I have recommended the use of smaller pages, since, from testing, I can see that pressing the Next button on a page saves that page's answers. If time then runs out, all saved answers get submitted.
Thanks. Since "Full screen popup..." is the quiz Security option, I opened the Net panel in the quiz popup window. When the timer ran out, nothing happened in the panel. I'm going to try it again with "None" for the Security option, though we always use the "Full screen..." to prevent copying.
This may be a bug, but if so, I don't think it has been reported yet
I think if this was broken, we would have heard of it by now.
With quiz security set to "None" the answers were saved and the quiz graded as soon as the timer expired. The Quiz Nav. block, which had been absent with "popup" security, also appeared with "None." We like to use the "popup" security though and would not want to do without it. Our host says the missing Quiz Nav. is an issue with the RLmaster theme. They are going to upgrade us to 2.3.4 and see what happens then.
Yes, the upgrade is certainly worth trying. If that does not work, then open the Firefox or Chrome console and watch as the timer gets to zero, to see if there any errors happening.