"Clear my choice" option not remembered?

"Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Richard Samson -
Number of replies: 14

We are using Moodle 3.8.

We have seen odd behaviour with the "Clear my choice" button for radio-button single answer quiz questions, when the quiz has various pages and navigation is free.

If a student marks an option A for Question 2 (say), goes to another page, returns to Question 2 and chooses Clear my choice, then goes to another page, then returns to Question 2, option A is marked instead of No choice. It's as if the Clear my choice option is not recorded in the cache of the browser.

Does that make sense?

Has anybody else seen or reported that?

We have seen the same behaviour on Chrome and Firefox.

Any help much appreciated.

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In reply to Richard Samson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Emma Richardson -
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What happens if you clear the browser cache? Does it show correctly?
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Dominique Bauer -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Hello Emma and Richard,

I observe the same behaviour as Richard and clearing the browser cache does not seem to do anything.

From what I understand, "Clear my choice" was recently added to work around the inherent behavior of radio buttons which, once a choice has been clicked, you can change the choice but you cannot leave the selection mode, that is, you cannot return to an initial list of choices where no choice is selected.

As it stands, if a student clicks on "Clear my choice" and submits the quiz, the selected choice before clicking on "Clear my choice" will be the answer considered for correction by Moodle, which is obviously quite misleading.

In my opinion, "Clear my choice" doesn't work as expected, at least in Moodle 3.8. Indeed, it is useless to cancel a choice if this cancellation is not saved. This behaviour should be reported in the Tracker as a bug, unless it has already been done. हसणे



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In reply to Dominique Bauer

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Richard Samson -
Thanks, Dominique and Emma, for your replies. It's not a cache issue. I've checked that.

I have a slightly different user story to the one Dominique describes. The problem we have is that Moodle loses track of the Clear my choice selection if the student revisits the page of that question before submitting their answers. If, in contrast, the student chooses Clear my choice wherever they want to and then goes to Finish my attempt and Submit without revisiting pages where they have selected this option, the non-answer is recorded correctly and submitted to Moodle as such.

Something weird is going on but I cannot submit this as a bug yet because I set up a trial on MoodleCloud earlier today (Moodle 3.8.2) and it worked fine. No issues with the Clear my choice functionality at all.

It seems we might have done something to our Moodle instance which is interfering with the Clear my choice functionality. A faulty plugin? I hope to send more news tomorrow.

Thanks again for your interest!
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In reply to Richard Samson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Emma Richardson -
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Ok, not a browser cache but how about a site cache - did you clear those? This still sounds like a caching issue to me...and how are they returning to the question - are they using the back arrow in the browser or the navigation block?
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Dominique Bauer -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Hello Emma and Richard,

You can try it on Moodle QA testing site, which is refreshed every hour probably with a cleared cache.

For example, use the Demo Quiz with all standard Quiz Questions. Add a page break say after question 4.

Then sign in as a student and take the quiz. On question 3, select say choice 'a'. Go to the next page using the navigation block or the Next page button. Return to the previous page using the navigation block or the Previous page button. In question 3, click on "Clear my choice". Move to the next page, than return to the previous page. In question 3, the choice is not cleared anymore and choice 'a' is still shown as being selected.

This is what makes me say that it does not work. हसणे

Also, if you select a choice, move to the next page, return to the previous page, click on 'Clear my choice' and submit the test, then the choice is not cleared anymore in the review page.

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In reply to Dominique Bauer

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Richard Samson -
Dominique, I have replicated your tests on the qa.moodledemo.net site and I agree with you. "Clear my choice" doesn't work properly there (on the Moodle 3.9 testing site).

But it works correctly on the Moodlecloud site (Moodle 3.8.2 (Build: 20200309)).

These are two vanilla Moodle sites running on very recent versions but they seem to behave differently. Why?

I'm lost.
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In reply to Dominique Bauer

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Tim Hunt -
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This does indeed sound like a bug. वाइट Please file it in the tracker.
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Richard Samson -
Emma, in these tests I have not used the browser navigation, just the Quiz Next/Previous page and the Quiz navigation block.
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In reply to Richard Samson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Joseph Rézeau -
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Just tested this problem on my Moodle localhost platform

Moodle 3.8.3 (Build: 20200511) / Windows 10  / Firefox

Here are my findings:

The problem originally mentioned by Richard, i.e. the "Clear my choice" option disappearing does not occur if the student uses the Quiz navigation block buttons.

It only occurs if the student uses the browser's Back / Forward buttons.

Additionally, if Debug messages is set to NORMAL: Show errors, warnings and notices an error message is displayed to the student:

You have entered data outside the normal sequence. This can occur if you use your browser's Back or Forward buttons; please don't use these during the test. It can also happen if you click on something while a page is loading. Click <strong>Continue</strong> to resume.

For me this does work as expected and there is no need to create a bug report. Only think is the students must be warned to NEVER use their browser's Back / Forward buttons.

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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Dominique Bauer -
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Maybe it works with Firefox, but not with Chrome.
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In reply to Dominique Bauer

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Joseph Rézeau -
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Same behaviour in Firefox and Chrome.
However, the bug IS there in Microsoft Edge.
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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Richard Samson -

At the risk of annoying Tim, who has warned me before about the irritation of videos for busy developers, I have screen-captured the whole business on Chrome and Firefox at the qa.moodledemo.net site, as fast as I could go.

First Chrome (1:22):

 

 

Then Firefox (1:10):

 

 

So I disagree with Joseph. This IS a general problem, not just with the Edge browser (which I do not use).

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In reply to Richard Samson

Re: "Clear my choice" option not remembered?

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Thanks for posting those videos, Richard. I have followed exactly the procedure you describe and I have to confirm that I was wrong and you were right, there IS a bug here!
Joseph
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