Student exceeded quiz time limit: how?

Student exceeded quiz time limit: how?

by Robin Collum -
Number of replies: 3

Hello all,

This is a question about v 2.9. I am the Administrator for a course. I have created a timed quiz with a set availability window. Time limit of 115 minutes. Like so:


I just went in to Quiz Admin>Results to view how students have performed on individual questions, and I saw that one student took almost 23 hours to complete his quiz!


When I went to see his attempt, it showed me this: 


I looked in "User Overrides" and there were none listed. I also checked with the course teachers, and confirmed that they didn't override the quiz for him. All other students finished the quiz within the time limit. 

Looking at the student's answers question-by-question, it appears that he selected all his answers within the time limit, but that the attempt was not submitted until the next day: 

I have the timing set to "Open Attempts Submit automatically", but I was under the impression that any answers they'd chosen would be submitted when the time was up, not 22 hours later! 

Does anyone have any ideas of how this may have happened? How can I ensure that it doesn't happen again? I thought that I followed the quiz building directions to the tee, but it's clear that something's been missed. Or did the student cheat somehow? 

I know that it's unlikely someone will be able to definitively identify the problem, but any suggestions or help would be very appreciated. 

Thanks,

Robin

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In reply to Robin Collum

Re: Student exceeded quiz time limit: how?

by Paul Nicholls -
If the student left the quiz (closed their web browser, logged out of Moodle or just navigated away from the quiz without properly finishing their attempt) before the time limit expired, the attempt would have stayed open until the next time the Quiz module's cron job ran.

The huge delay before the attempt was closed suggests that your Moodle site might be set up to only run the Moodle cron script once per day. I'd suggest checking this with your Moodle administrator - and getting them to increase its frequency if that's the case.  Moodle has had a built-in task scheduler since 2.7, so it's recommended to run the main Moodle cron job once per minute - leaving it to Moodle's task scheduler to run only the relevant tasks each time.  Individual tasks' schedules can be configured via the Moodle interface (by a site administrator) if the default schedules don't suit your particular situation.
Average of ratings: Useful (3)
In reply to Paul Nicholls

Re: Student exceeded quiz time limit: how?

by Robin Collum -
Thanks Paul!

I am the administrator, but I'm new at this. We have shared web hosting, so I will enlist their tech support if necessary to get this done. 

I will also remind students that they have to follow through with all the steps and actually submit their answers!

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In reply to Robin Collum

Re: Student exceeded quiz time limit: how?

by Tim Hunt -
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Yes. It was almost certainly the case that cron did not run for a long time.

In that case, the attempt will be auto-submitted the next time the student goes into the quiz. There is no chance they could answer any more questions after time has expired.

But, it is best to ensure that cron is running on your server.

Average of ratings: Useful (2)