Hi all,
I've created exams for my course using randomized questions. For some reason, students are getting repeat questions though. Can anyone help me fix this so that they get random questions from the pool, but not duplicates within the exam. Most quizzes have 25 questions, but the final has 100 and there were 2-peats and 3-peats.
This is our current version:
Thanks for any help!
I'm bumping my post to see if anyone may be able to help with this problem or tell me which forum I should be posting this question in. I'd really like to be able to use the randomize test questions feature for my exams so students don't get the same exam.
Thanks,
Marcia
H M Gordon,
It sounds like what you really want to do is when creating your quiz, under Layout, you want to set the Question order to Shuffled randomly. Then when adding the questions, YOU select the questions you want from the question bank category list, and add them to the quiz. This will ensure that the students all get the same questions, just not in the same order.
I suspect that when you made your quiz, you were using the "Add a random question ..." button, while Editing the quiz. If you do, you need to have a very large question bank compared to the number of questions you want to have in the quiz, or you WILL get repeats.
It's been a long time since I read about it, but the Moodle documentation or forums, used to have an explanation of why you can wind up with "2-peats and 3-peats" when using randomized questions. If I remember correctly, the odds of getting a repeat goes up a bunch, when the number of questions you have in your quiz gets anywhere close to even half the total number available in the question bank.
I use that "Add a random question ..." button two ways. I have a random quiz class with numerous 10 question random quizzes on different subjects. I let students take them on their own so they can "memorize" how to do things in my computer applications class as we have no books and no table space to be able to take notes with pencil and paper.
The other way I use it, is when giving a small test on multiple subjects. Since I am pulling only 4 or 5 questions from multiple banks of 40 or 50 questions, it is unlikely they will get repeats.
Hope this helps,
AL
Marcia,
If a specific student gets repeated questions in a specific quiz attempt, then something is wrong. According to the random question documentation at, http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Editing_a_quiz#Adding_random_questions repeated questions should not occur within a given quiz attempt (emphasis is mine).
As long as you have questions in the question bank, you can add random questions to your quiz. This might be useful if you have students in a class taking a quiz at the same time, because they are unlikely to get the same questions at the same time. The same question will never appear twice in a quiz. If you include several random questions then different questions will always be chosen for each of them. If you mix random questions with non-random questions then the random questions will be chosen so that they do not duplicate one of the non-random questions. This does imply that you need to provide enough questions in the category from which the random questions are chosen, otherwise the student will be shown a friendly error message. The more questions you provide the more likely it will be that students get different questions on each attempt.
So, if you can clearly document this, it should be entered in the Moodle Tracker, https://tracker.moodle.org
-Floyd
The most likely cause is if you have two copies of the same question in your question bank. Moodle will not know that both questions are actually identical, and both could end up in the quiz.
Duplicate questions happen more often than people realize if they were using Moodle 1.9 and moved courses to Moodle 2.x using backup and restore. This happened to me.
In Moodle 1.9.19+ I was using ONE copy of a question in each subject question bank. Because I was using a non-standard wiki plugin, upgrade to Moodle 2.x would not work. I had to use backup and restore to move each course on to Moodle 2.x. Each quiz in the restore process created new copies of the all the questions in the quiz, many of which used the same questions, so I wound up with LOTS of duplicate questions. Took hours and hours to track down all the duplicates and get back to only one copy of each question.
I admit some of this how and why is above my head, but it is very possible there was an upgrade as you describe. I was not part of the initial launch of moodle here so can't speak to that. This course has never been as "clean" as some of the other courses I'm working with now and it was one of the first added.
To save time looking for and deleting these duplicates as you did, I reloaded questions into new categories by chapter. There are now a silly number of categories in the course, but I was able to recreate quizzes quickly by selecting only a few random questions chapter by chapter from the new categories. I no longer have repeats and shuffling means they don't get the questions on the final in chapter pool order. Thank you all for taking the time to help
Sorry, I did not think to include the method I used to "clean" out the duplicates. I moved EVERY question into one category. This automatically grouped all the duplicates together in the question bank list because they are the same type question with the same "question name." I then went to each of my quizzes and removed the questions from them. (I wanted to keep the settings or I would have just deleted all the quizzes.) I then deleted all but one of each question with the same "question name." I then went back and repopulated each of my old categories and put questions back in each quiz.
Sounds like a lot of work, but it actually went very quickly once I realized it was possible to remove all questions from a quiz at one time, instead of one-by-one. Now I have only one copy of each question to maintain when I need to change its wording or a picture.
AL
That makes sense. If I find this happening in any of the other courses, I'll give it a try. It wasn't terribly time-consuming to do what I did though so it's all good.
