Quiz

I greatly appreciate your help with Moodle over the years - the deferred question type with explanation has been a hit with my colleagues. You had coded this in 2015 upon my urging. Whenever I train colleagues, I always put you prominently in the acks.

I understand the history. Thanks for sharing it. Let me share a bit of experience. I have held close to 50 proctored exams with Moodle, each with 50-1000 students. Normally (before this lockdown), the students worked on on-campus machines, and they were very careful in logging out after clicking submit. Over the last 4-5 years of use, not even once have we had this problem in proctored exams. Reason - students are careful, and they always click submit, which manually triggers the exam close activity, or they are still on the quiz page when their clock runs out on them.

Moodle has never crashed for us even under simultaneous loads of as many as 15 different courses with assignment/quiz submission deadlines with anywhere between 40-500 students each. Our connections are fairly good on campus (10 Gbps backbone with optical data links for hostels).

Let us say the exam closes. And as you say, Moodle closes attempts one by one. Say it takes 2-3 milliseconds to close each attempt (I am probably being conservative here, this is probably faster than that). In a class of 50 students, that is 150 milliseconds of closing time. No one rational expects simultaneous closure. If someone even got a minute extra this way (and I am being generous), no one will bat an eyelid at it. That is still (a lot) better than pen and paper exams where it takes time to get all the sheets in, and such differentials can rise to as much as 5 minutes.

What I am talking about is quizzes being found partially ungraded anywhere between 9-36 hours later. That is what our problem is, and it is a complete mess now that students are working from home over all kinds of networks, ranging from 2G to high-speed broadband. No matter what the network is, what we do have are responses that Moodle saved (I can see these when I click on review attempt for a quiz attempt that is in progress). Moodle already has those saved on the server. If I wanted to, I could manually grade such a student (not possible in large classes). I am not connecting to a client when I see those attempts, am I? That means that Moodle is not waiting for any more information. It is, to all intents and purposes, stuck in a zombie state when it comes to that student's attempt. Maybe students could be nicer to us and click submit, but sometimes students just get sidetracked when they have completed the attempt early - they close the browser window after saving their answers, and do something else - it is their own machine that they are working on, so they are not worried about someone else butting in on an open session. Maybe they think they will come in later (before the closing time) to review their answers, but don't get the time - I can only guess. So, we end up with a more than a painful number of zombie attempts every quiz/assignment (lot of colleagues are using the quiz activity to create "assignments" because of auto-grading).

Can't the Moodle quiz close activity have a hook (call it a housekeeping hook) that checks whether a quiz is closed, say 1-5 minutes after the exam is supposed to have closed? Reason for those numbers  - I can justify the credibility of the exam if all students get roughly equal time to within a few minutes of each other. If the log says that a student's quiz attempt closed 10 hours later, then that is what the reviewer/judge (yes, exams do get litigated upon here) is going to believe - I cannot point him or her to you and say that "Please ignore the suspicious-looking log, and trust me/Moodle developers when we tell you that this student did not get any extra time.".

I guess what I am trying to say - because of the lockdown situation, we have uncovered a problem with the way Moodle handles quizzes. We are not looking for submissions simultaneous within microseconds - a few minutes is perfectly fine. Just not hours, or days later, please?