Hi Gordon,
First of all, big thanks for your work on the hotpot module and the hotpot import plugins. They're both immensely useful!
I have a suggestion regarding the HotPot question import plugin. More specifically, the import of multiselect questions. There is a significant difference between the ways this type of question is handled by Hot Potatoes software and by Moodle. Let's consider a question where there are five answer options, out of which 2 options are correct and 3 - incorrect.
In Hot Potatoes the scoring is handled in such a way that each answer option is awarded 20% of the grade (since there are 5 answers). The student is awarded points:
- he must select the two correct answers and he will get 40% (20% for each) if he selects them both,
- he must not select the three incorrect answers and he will get 60% (20% for each) if he doesn't select any of the three.
Moodle uses a different logic - each answer may be given any percentage value, the teacher decides how to weigh them. He may also decide to assign negative percentages to incorrect answers.
Now, while importing a multi-select question from Hot Potates, the import plugin calculates the scores for the correct answers by dividing 100% by the number of those (correct) answers. So far, so good However, a problem remains about the incorrect answers. They are not assigned any value during import (they are graded in Moodle as "None"). This makes the questions "hackable"
by students - if a student selects ALL answers (both correct and incorrect) in a multi-select question in Moodle, he will get 100% for that question!
My suggestion is that during import the incorrect answers should be treated similarly to the correct ones, only in the negative. That is, the scores for all incorrect answers should add up to minus 100%. What do you think?
All the best,
Przemek