A question bank for many different quizes?

A question bank for many different quizes?

by Carl Brewer -
Number of replies: 8

Moodle 3.2.3, and I'm new to Moodle! (very!).

I have a set of exams to prepare sample questions for, somewhat complex.

I have seven subjects, which have easy, moderate, and hard questions, depending on the level of the course - imagine grade 1,2 and 3, sort of.  Close enough anyway smile

I have for grade 1 and 2, all the subjects combined into one quiz - grade 1 has just the easy ones, grade 2 has easy and moderate ones

For grade 3, the subjects are tested separately and have easy, moderate and hard questions

So, I will have 21 different types of question!  Easy grade 1 subject 1 through to hard grade 3 subject 3

I want to be able to put together random quiz'es for grade 1 - so all 7 subjects but only the easy questions, grade 2 - all 7 subjects easy and moderate questions, and grade 3, seven separate quiz'es, one per subject, with easy, moderate and hard questions.

I'd rather not duplicate questions over and over, but would prefer to have a pool of them, tagged in some way that they would get selected appropriately for each grade and for grade 3, each subject.  Ideally also selecting a set number of questions per subject in the grade 1 & 2 tests so that each quiz has a fair number of questions from each subject - not needed in the grade 3 quiz, as it has separate quiz'es per subject - but it would need a fair number of the harder questions - hard to describe!

Is this something that can be done with Moodle's built-in quiz module? If so, any recommendations as to what documentation to read?



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In reply to Carl Brewer

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Yes, the question bank does all of this.  You just need to set up the appropriate categories and then you can create quizzes that pull a certain amount of questions from each category.  

If you need these questions to span across different courses, you will need to create the categories at the category or system level.  If you are admin, that should be no problem.  Otherwise look up the documentation on sharing questions and the question creator role.

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Carl Brewer -
That's great, thank you Emma!
I can't, for the life of me, see how to create a question bank at the top/system level though?  I can see how to create questions in a course, but not globally.
What's the trick? I am using the admin user account.
Thank you!
Carl

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In reply to Carl Brewer

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Mark Hardwick -

Carl,

I agree with Emma in that you should set up the questions with categories at the "System" level.  You should be able to put the question in one time in the category that you choose without duplicating it.  Then pull those questions either specifically or at random.  For instance, as long as you have equal to or more questions in the category that what you need for an exam, you can pull either part of an exam at random or the whole exam.  If you have 20 1st grade math questions then you could build a quiz that pulls up to 20 random questions from that category.  If you try to pull 21 questions then it won't know what to do.  You can mix random questions with other questions from other categories as you wish.

Is it possible that you are not logged into a course when you're trying to set up the question bank?  If so, you must have a course open to get to the bank.

Mark

         

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In reply to Mark Hardwick

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Sarra Lev -

I have been reading about bugs when you put questions in the system level. Is this true of the latest versions of moodle, and if so, are there also bugs if one puts questions in the Miscellaneous level?

Thanks!

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In reply to Sarra Lev

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Emma Richardson -
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It really depends on the size of the question bank.  It can cause issues with backup and restore because a quiz will always include the question bank and if the question bank is all at the system level it means that every single question will be included in that.  This can cause timeouts with duplicating a quiz and restoring courses.

Honestly, I am not sure if this has improved in more recent versions as I finally gave up on the system level bank a couple of years ago and have not returned to it.  The concept is excellent but until the background workings are redone, it can be more trouble than it is worth.  

The other thing you have to think about is the possibility that a teacher will change someone else's questions and not realize that it changes for every quiz that question is in, which has the potential to mess up grading as well.

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Sarra Lev -

Thank you. I am the only teacher (it's on my cloud site). Is there a way, though, to copy individual questions from my school site to my cloud site without backing up the entire bank? 

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In reply to Sarra Lev

Re: A question bank for many different quizes?

by Emma Richardson -
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Yes, you can export questions directly from the question bank.

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