I hope this wasn't posted somewhere else, I did a search and couldn't find anything.
I am using Moodle 3.9
I used a drag and drop question for the first time and because of the complexity of what I'm assessing, I simply used Xs as markers on an electrical diagram without adding any drop zones. The reason is that if you put a marker on this part of the image, you did not need it in the other part, but if you didn't you had to here and here.... It seemed easier to manually grade it and adjust the mark accordingly. The quiz allowed me to not add the drop zones.
In a class of 14 students, 5 students had their markers moved around after placing them. One of them noticed before submitting their test, so I had the student screen shot it and send it to me. When I compared the screen shot to the submitted answer, they were different (markers had moved). 4 of the 5 that had this issue were using Chrome, the other Edge, all on Windows machines. None of them were using touch screens.
I was going to try again with drop zones until I talked to another instructor that said he had the exact same issue, but was using set up drop zones.
I was told that the problem was that I had hacked the system by not using drop zones and only half set the question up; but it seemed it happened to at least one other instructor who did use drop zones (I only talked to one other instructor about it), so I doubt that is the problem.
Any help with this is greatly appreciated. I really like Moodle quizzes, but feel I cannot trust this type of question again until I get it figured out.
Thanks
Are you using 3.9 or 3.9.3? There have been bug fixes in this area - although none of the bugs match what you describe.
Your report is pretty vague, which does not help understand the problem. To start with: there are three drag-drop question types in Moodle. Which one were you using exactly?
Can we see these screen-grabs? Or can you export the question from the question bank and attach it here? (If you don't want to post them publicly, you can email them to me, or can you make a similar but different question which demonstrates the issue, and attach that, if you don't want to share an exam question.)
Your report is pretty vague, which does not help understand the problem. To start with: there are three drag-drop question types in Moodle. Which one were you using exactly?
Can we see these screen-grabs? Or can you export the question from the question bank and attach it here? (If you don't want to post them publicly, you can email them to me, or can you make a similar but different question which demonstrates the issue, and attach that, if you don't want to share an exam question.)
Sorry for the late reply, it took a while to get a response on exactly which version of Moodle we are using (I do not seem to have the appropriate privileges to see this). The reply I received was 3.9
I have attached an image of the test question that was submitted. I also tried recreating the question from the original test.
I had someone try to help me where I work, and the question was edited by them and I cannot seem to find a way to reset to the original question. A solution was not found. To my knowledge, the only differences between the one I attached and the original is that on the original, I added about 30 X markers as for some reason I missed the fact that we could set how many of the same markers to allow from 1 to an infinite amount.
Thanks for all the help. This is my first term teaching and testing from Moodle. This is also the first time I have tried teaching an Electrical class online from my basement.
Garry
OK, so this is a drag-drop markers question. And, now that you have discovered the option for multiple identicle markers, you migh be able to get Moodle to grade it automatically.
(I am now wondering why we decided on 1, 2, ... 6 and infinity. 6 seems like a relatively small number to stop at.)
(Oh, and nice question. I have no idea what the right answer is, but it seems like something where you have to really know the subject to get it right.)
Anyway, none of this really explains why Moodle messed up the markers for some students. ...
Oh! here is a thought: it is a feature of this qusetion type that you can move the markers around using the arrow keys on the keyboard. That is useful if you can't use a mouse, or if you want to make fine adjustments. But, of course, normally the arrow keys are a way to scroll the page. Could that be what happened here?
Apart from that, I can't see why it would happen. The way this question type works is, as the marker is moved around, the position is stored in a hidden input. Then, when the form is submitted, that gets sent back to the server. There is not much there to go wrong. The most useful thing woud be if you (or anyone) could find reliable 'Steps to reproduce' the problem.
Oh! and playing with this, I just found another bug: MDL-70426.
Thanks so much Tim. I'm still learning a lot about Moodle and really appreciate the help. The infinite markers will definitely be a time saver.
I actually do not want this to be automatically graded because if you put one here, you don't have to there, but if you don't... Pretty tough to auto grade, so that's why I wasn't worried about drop zones.
I am also going to include one of the submitted questions from my students. I deleted the screen shot I had him take when he realized there was a problem with markers moving around, but I showed where they would have been in the attached image.
Hopefully this is a gremlin in our system that goes away when we update to a newer version. There is multiple instructors having this same issue.
Are you familiar with using web browser developer tools? If so, it would be helpful if you cold dig into the HTML and find what the hidden form fields say for this question (Right click, Choose inspect element, then hunt around in the HTML for the relevant bit.)
So, here that would be:
<div class="ddform">Hmm. I wonder if we really want all those decimal places. I wonder if the bug is related to that? (Though I have not yet been able to reproduce the bug in Firefox.)
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c1" name="q15:4_c1" value="108.75,171.00001525878906" class="choices choice1 noofdrags1">
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c2" name="q15:4_c2" value="" class="choices choice2 noofdrags1">
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c3" name="q15:4_c3" value="351.75,142.00001525878906" class="choices choice3 noofdrags1">
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c4" name="q15:4_c4" value="345.75,244.00001525878906" class="choices choice4 noofdrags1">
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c5" name="q15:4_c5" value="" class="choices choice5 noofdrags1">
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c6" name="q15:4_c6" value="345,364.00001525878906" class="choices choice6 noofdrags1">
<input type="hidden" id="q15_4_c7" name="q15:4_c7" value="" class="choices choice7 noofdrags1">
</div>