Enemy questions (and friend)

Enemy questions (and friend)

by Ray Morris -
Number of replies: 3

I don't see any mention of "enemy questions" on this forum or in the Plugins directory, which surprises me because several users have separately mentioned them to me. Is there a different term I should be searching for, or any discussion of this that I'm not finding?


The concept is that you could use random questions, but mark two questions as "enemy questions", so if it randomly chooses question X, it should not also choose question Y. An example would be:

1. What year did the United States of America become independent?

2. What does USA stand for?


Question #1 provides the answer to question #2, so the random selection should not choose both of them.


A related concept is "friend" questions - the randomizer should choose either both as a pair, or neither.

The "combined" question type and Cloze questions somewhat provide this functionality, though not as cleanly as being able to mark separate questions as friends does.

Has there been any thought to supporting either?  Enemy questions particularly are important to my users.









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In reply to Ray Morris

Re: Enemy questions (and friend)

by Ray Morris -

I did just find something related in MDL-40990 "question dependencies".   That doesn't quite fit the need. As discussed in the forum thread, the dependencies are not attached to the questions, but are manually added explicitly for a single quiz, saying that a STUDENT can not access question B before they answer question A.  However, it doesn't remind the instructor to keep the questions together or separate when building a quiz, or affect the operation of random questions, as far as I can see.


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In reply to Ray Morris

Re: Enemy questions (and friend)

by Melanie Scott -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

When you want random questions where one question is picked and the other is not, you should set up categories in your question bank.  Each category contains the "enemy" questions.  On the quiz, you select one question randomly from that category. 

So, here's the set up for a 10 question quiz with 10 "enemy" pairs:

First, go to the question bank and create 10 categories.

In the first category, create your first set of "enemies." Go to the second category and create the next pair and so on. (if the questions already exist without categories, create the categories and then move them to the categories)

Go to your quiz, open the first category.  Scroll to the bottom of the question chooser and you'll see the randomizer option.  Add one question randomly.  Go to each category and repeat.  Make sure you give the page time to finish loading because sometimes it takes time for it to register the change in category and you accidentally add two from the same category.

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In reply to Ray Morris

Re: Enemy questions (and friend)

by Darren Cocco -

I understand the problem you are describing. Essentially this is a set problem, you wish to create unordered sets of exclusionary questions and an ordered set of inclusionary questions.

This would create a situation where once a single question is selected from an unordered exclusionary set no other questions can be picked from it.

In regards to the ordered inclusionary set one would be unable to pick the questions inside the set so much as the set itself to be presented in the order they exist inside the set.

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