Personalised question for each student

Personalised question for each student

by Miguel Rivera -
Number of replies: 4

Dear all,

I am trying to figure out how to do a very specific task, I wonder if Moodle has a built-in solution.

I have a list of students and wish to set them all a similar task, but each with a different answer (e.g. "Give the square root of your user ID").

Would there be a way of supplying such a question for each student?

To clarify, I can prepare all of the answers ahead of time, say in a .csv file. I just don't know how to turn them into a quiz format.

This would need to be scalable up to about 100 students.

Best wishes,

Miguel

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Miguel Rivera

Re: Personalised question for each student

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Within standard Moodle, look at the 'Calculated' question type. It is not a fixed variant for each student, but with enough different random versions of each question, that is good enough.

If you are going to be doing a lot of maths assessment, I woudl recomment looking at one of the add-on question types https://moodle.org/plugins/qtype_formulas or https://moodle.org/plugins/qtype_stack.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Personalised question for each student

by Miguel Rivera -
Thank you! This is definitely a step in the direction want.

The only issue is that my questions are not maths questions, they are programming ones. So the "formula" to get to the solution is significantly too complicated to be input in a single line (unlike my example, sorry about that). Maybe a more realistic question would be: "Write the sum of each element in the prime decomposition of your user ID".

Would you know if "STACK" or a different question type would be appropriate?
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Miguel Rivera

Re: Personalised question for each student

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
For computing exercises, it is definitely worth looking at CodeRunner https://coderunner.org.nz/, thought it requires additional back-end setup to use. STACK lets you 'program' your question using the Maxima computer algebra system (https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima/) , so there are few limits on what you can do. It can certainly do your prime decomposition example.

I assume you have realised that basing it on student id raises fairness issues. The question is going to be much easier for someone with a student number of 10000000 (or 00000001) than 37482355. Randomisation between some example that have been picked to be about equally hard would be better (and the quiz statistics later let you see if the different variants of the question did, in fact, get roughly equal average scores.)
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Personalised question for each student

by Miguel Rivera -

Thanks, that's plenty of resources for me to explore!

Yes, the issue of fairness is at the front of my mind. I mention student IDs because they are a convenient random seed, but the idea is to provide questions which can only be solved programmatically. My model is things like Advent of Code or Project Euler.

Making the questions individual is to gently discourage cheating. Not foolproof but it doesn't need to be for my purposes.

Average of ratings: -