Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

by lucia liljegren -
Number of replies: 5

Hi,

I've created a "final exam" practice quiz from questions in my "course" testbank.   The course test bank organizes all the questions into topics (or chapters.) This makes it convenient for me resuse questions both in when the student is learning a topic (e.g. "fluid mechanics) and later when making a comprehensive final.  For the final, I select the questions from the topics.


But now, I'd like to expert all the question in the final because as far as I can tell, the "export" function on the quiz side needs me to have those questions in the "quiz" question bank.

Is there some easy way to export the questions in the quiz itself-- rather than just those in the bank associated with the quiz?


I hope this makes sense.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to lucia liljegren

Re: Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

As you say, currently, using the standard Moodle interface, it is only possible to export one category from the question bank (optionally including all its sub-categories).

If fact the underlying question export system is capable of exporting any list of questions (thanks to some work done by Jamie Pratt). It is just that option is not hooked up to the user-interface. Here is some code I wrote in qtype_stack to export just one question: https://github.com/maths/moodle-qtype_stack/blob/master/exportone.php.

It would be possible to write a similar script which, given a quiz id, exports all the questions contained in that quiz.

But, it does need someone to write that PHP code.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

by Jan Derriks -


There is a simple plugin that adds a filter to the question tool to select USED/UNUSED questions from the question bank:

https://moodle.org/plugins/local_unusedquestions (Not updated but still working on 3.2.2.)

If there is only 1 quiz using questions then this is a way to select those questions but you can only do "move to category" and not "export" from the question bank so you have to move them to another category to export and then you have to re-arrange them.

Another workaround is to export the question bank (xml/gift) and use external tools (vim?) to select questions from there. But how to get the question numbers from a quiz? And what tools are there?


Question bank management in Moodle itself could also use extra features like:

- show in what quizzes is a question is used and filter on that (extension on old plugin above)
- mark question as read-only if it is still in a quiz (a question in a quiz review should not be allowed to be easily changed by teacher)
- link questions to other categories without duplicating or removing from original category. So a category can be "Questions in Final Quiz".
- select questions and put them in an exportable (temporary) category
- ...there must be a list of QB feature requests somewhere that I am repeating here...?


I wonder how other univerities manage large question banks and quiz archives.
The external tool option seems like a nice CS student assignment. Maybe I find a student here at www.HvA.nl







Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Jan Derriks

Re: Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

by Hugo Ribeiro -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Thank you Jan,

Moodle quiz tool is pretty amazing for a non dedicated e-assessment tool. However I reckon the QB management is it major weakness. 

We don't have any development team that could do that, unfortunately. We could, perhaps, get students to work on that, but would it be risky?..

So, the question how do we manage large question banks... I'd say we dont. 85% of our teachers are using "Questions in Final Quiz" category.

Do you use that  used/unused plugin?

Thanks in advance,

Hugo


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Hugo Ribeiro

Re: Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

by lucia liljegren -

Thanks,

Since my php scripting (and knowledge of the layout of the moodle code) is not the best, I ended up  rearranging.


My situation is I am a personal tutor for a number of students. In the US, we have "AP exams"; those will take place the first week in May. For those students taking those tests, I want to create some practice quizzes so they can do retrieval practice.  To get the most efficient outcome, I want a subset of questions that are "AP like/level" and I'd like offer quizzes that select 10 from a bank of many (optimally 1000 or so, I've got roughly 200 AP like/level right now.).  Then the kids can practice a few each night over the course of April.

But of course, I'll also always want the AP like/level questions to come up when they are first covering the material.  

I ended up sorting all the AP like ones into a sub-category in each topic. (So: Fluid mechanics now has a "AP Phys 2" level category, in addition to "hydrostatic equation", "Bernouilli's equation" and so on.)

I then exported the "AP like/level" questions from each of the topics and made a new category "AP Phys 2 Final Practice", and now I can pick questions at random out of *that* category.

Otherwise-- at least as far as I could tell, I couldn't find an easy way to pull the right "kind" of question out randomly.



Average of ratings: -
In reply to lucia liljegren

Re: Exporting Quiz or Quiz Questions

by Jan Derriks -


Thanks for sharing.

Currently I'm trying to spring-clean our question bank that has around 4000 questions spread over lots of courses and categories. The "System" category still had a lot of questions that were copied to course level and course-category level some years ago.

That is where the plugin to show used/unused questions came in handy to select and delete all unused questions and move the others to where they belong (lower in the system>coursecategory>course>questioncategory hierarchy).  I used phpmyadmin and searched the quiz tabel to find the quiz where a question was still in use. There should be a plugin for that.

Finding duplicate questions over multiple categories is also a nice-to-have feature on my wish list.

Deleting multiple (empty) question categories at once is another one: it's crazy that you have to delete every category one-by-one (see screenshot below - cannot delete all empty categories at once).

We use Moodle quizzes with 600 students in two large halls (see picture) with pc's to do course exams. Safeexambrowser is used for exams on BYOD (laptops) with smaller groups (50 students at a time). And programming exams are done with the VirtualProgrammingLab Moodle extensions. Works great.



Attachment categories_delete.PNG
Attachment IWOzaal.jpg
Average of ratings: Useful (1)