Timer and answers to the Essay questions

Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Elena Ivanova -
Number of replies: 9
Hi everyone,

Today we have discovered the following issue.
Instructor has a quiz with a mixture of essay and other questions, which has several pages and countdown timer.

When student takes a quiz, he fills out information on one page and then clicks 'Save without submitting' button. The screen refreshes after that, staying on the same page of the quiz.
Then, if a student does not wait for the timer to re-appear (and it can take quite some time if you have a slow connection) and goes straight to the next page of the quiz, then answers to essay questions, and whatever follows right after them (t/f, mult choice), are erased.
Answers that appear before the first essay question, stay in place.

Many times students will go from page 3 of quiz to page 1, make small change, click save and jump back to page 3 without waiting for the timer. This will, again, erase whatever they have previously saved.
I will attach screenshots below.

We run 1.6.3 + (2006050531), and we have disabled HTML-editor for essay questions.

I have not found anything in the Issue tracker or on Forums. Should I submit a bug report?

Has anyone see anything like this? Do you have any suggestions? mixed

Thank you!


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In reply to Elena Ivanova

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Elena Ivanova -
Question 3 (also got erased since it followed essay)
Attachment Q3.jpg
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In reply to Elena Ivanova

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Are you sure it is the timer that is causing this? I can't understand how that would happen.

Can you try diabling the timer and seeing if this is still reproducable?
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Elena Ivanova -
You were right, it is just essay questions and the page that is not getting loaded fully.
I have noticed the issue on the short pages (max 3 questions) with the timer, since timer slows done page refresh considerably.

Therefore, I have created another quiz with no timer and put more questions on one page there. With some intense clicking I have replicated the same issue:

If saved page is not reloaded fully and student already progresses to the next, then answers to the essay questions and whatever follows after them will get erased.

I can advise faculty and students about possible solutions, but I still think that this is a bug wide eyes.

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In reply to Elena Ivanova

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Yes, it's a bug. The links are javascript already, so we can probably fix it by disabling them until the page has finished loading.
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In reply to Elena Ivanova

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Ghassan Geara -
Hi Elena,
I got exactly the same scenario during a quiz.
But the quiz settings were:
- 40 questions: 5 are Essays others are MC, Short Answer, Matching,..
- All questions on ONE page.
- 1 attempt allowed
- Timer running (set to 120 min.)

2 students out of 15 lost their work in the 2nd essay question and beyond!
Couldn't know why.

Now, as a precaution measure, I suggest instructors to always ask students to click on "Save without submitting" each time they fill an Essay question. Now i'll have to tell students also to wait for Timer to show again before proceeding?

Not to forget the problem of the HTML editor after the 1st essay question, which disappear always.
Hmm... i'm afraid we'll loose some Moodle "quiz" believers with all these bugs around. Hope we'll get fixes for these soon.

Regards.

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In reply to Ghassan Geara

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
My recommendation is to build quizzes with fewer questions on each page.

If all the questions are on one page, some students are bound to just work down the whole page and not save anything until the end. That is very dangerous. Like typing a multi-page word document and not saving anything until you have finished.

If you split the questions between pages, then every time the student moves from one page to the next, their answers are saved, so the amount of data at risk at any time is very small.

I also think it is better pedagogically to encourage the student to focus on one thing at a time - that is break up the MC questions into logically related groups, and put each essay question on a separate page.

(And yes, my argument will be more convincing once we (the OU) can contribute our flashy new quiz navigation interface back into Moodle core.)
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In reply to Ghassan Geara

Re: Timer and answers to the Essay questions

by Elena Ivanova -
Hi Ghassan,
Yep, it is actually nice to have a timer in this situation, since it serves as an indicator that page had been reloaded, and answer had been saved (even though it slows performance).
For quizzes without the timer, we now tell students to scroll down and make sure that the page had been reloaded fully after "Save without submitting".

As Tim pointed out putting one essay question per page might help, but if you have timer on the page, slow connection, and good mouse-clicking skills (assuming you click ""Save without submitting" and go to the next page right away) - you may still run into the same issue!

Regarding html-editor in the essay questions - I would recommend you to turn it off completely there. Loading more than three instances of the HTML editor on a page reliably causes browser (mostly IE) to fail in one way or another.




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