Quiz

Hi Art,

Thx for your answer. I hope I won't need too much help, in fact I have to take the actual quiz module, adapt what should be adapted and then purpose my changes to the community. Maybe they think it is not bad.

Regards,

Nico

I'd recommend focusing your development time on two components of your project that are not yet fulfiled by the standard 1.5 quiz or coming in 1.6:

Quiz templates: allow a quiz of a 'type' to be created which sets all of your defaults (e.g. practice quiz, final exam, etc.). If you also look at lesson, you can see that we implemented a way for a lesson template to be set per course (save these settings as default). If this could be done with quiz, so that default settings could be saved as templates and shared among courses the way question categories are now, then that would be a great improvement for busy teachers and (if coded well, well documented and using the Moodle API and coding guidelines) could possibly be added to the main Moodle distribution.

Individual quiz copying would be another great improvement, right now it's easy to copy types of activities from one course to another, e.g. it's easy to copy all the quiizzes from once course to another course, but it would be nice it if was easy to copy one specific quiz.

If I were teaching CS courses, there would be a requirement for student projects: code it, yes, but make sure to follow the guidelines of the project you are coding for. Because chances are it won't be easy for the core project team to integrate it, even if it the gee spiffyist widget of the century, if you don't. In my opinion your long range goal should be to get your code integrated into the main project or at least make is easy to keep updated by using as much of the standard API and coding style as you can. And comment clearly when you are creating new functions, classes, etc. so other coders can follow what you are trying to do.

" I want a test with 3 questions of this pool and 2 of this one and those questions should be randomly chosen so each student gets a different test. "

This is a feature that I would like to see.  When using Moodle's quiz maker, I have found it difficult to manage my pools.  In fact, in other software, I have seen the pool creation and management process SEPARATED from the assessment management process, and there are some merits to that approach.  I would like to have control about how many questions come from each pool, but allow the questions to be randomized within sections of the test.  That might not make sense, so let me give an example:

I might have small quizzes every week or so.  When it comes time for the final, I would like to give a comprehensive exam that pulls from the various pools created for those weekly quizzes.  My two problems are:  1) I would like to have more questions from some weeks than other weeks (maybe a topic was very important, or took longer than a week to cover) and 2) I would like to set up the test where the questions pertaining to each of the topics were presented in order, but the questions within each of the topic groups were randomized. 

The reason for that is because students are already in a stressful position when taking an exam.  To ask a question from the beginning of the course, then a question from the end of the course, then another question from the first third of the course seems very fragmentary and stress-inducing to me.  Even when I give the small quizzes on the reading for the week, I was not happy that the questions forced the students to flip all over the reading to find the response.  I would LOVE to have the questions presented in order, just randomly leaving out one or the other so that different students would get different tests but still have a logical progression of thought.  After all, I am not about trying to reduce their knowledge to a series of disconnected facts!  Randomized tests can make you feel like you entered a whirlwind!  But as teachers, we need them to combat cheating and introduce challenge.

This may be completely outside of your project parameters, but it was such an interesting conversation that I couldn't help throwing in a few more curveballs!  (only you should see me play baseball.  It is a disaster!)  And if you already know how to do that in Moodle, and I just haven't figured it out, please send me a link to a tutorial!

Regards,
atw