"adaptive mode and "real negative" negative marks mutually exclusive"
It seems a good way to fix it as Tim agrees.

Pierre

To what questiontypes do you want to apply negative marking?

All question types or just the ones where the student is given a choice so he has no advantages to play loto...like multichoice, true false question.

Otherwise having a 0 ...1 scale is equivalent to -0.5 ...0.5 or -1 ...1 if it was not that students are more at ease with a 0-100% scale in USA , 0-20 in France etc..

Actually the following question types do not allow negative grading to a bad answer : shortanswer, numerical, calculated, match, truefalse.

Pierre


P.S. But effectively we as teacher are sometimes more angry (i.e. he should get a negative score!!) with a student that is answering a question with the error that was the main subject of the last three hours course than with one that do not answer at all .

1. As the customer/client for this work, the bit you are responsible for is the requirements. How exactly do you want it to work? Anyone bidding for this work will need to know, so they can estimate it.

The proposed implementation is the business of the developer you hire. They will need to think briefly about their proposed implementation before they quote you a price, and will need to spend more time on a detailed desing once they know they have got the work.

2 & 3, we can discuss the requirements now. As you say, discussion of the design has to come later.


The three proposed enhancements are distinct pieces of work, and it would make sense to specify and implement them as separate changes.

From a business point of view, however, it would be easier to find just one developer to do all three, and build a good working relationship with them. But if you were planning to comission lots more Moodle development work in the future, you might want to invest more effort in outsourcing this work to three different developers now, so you can decide who you might, or might not want to work with again.


Some comments on the individual projects:

1. The main thing to decide when writing your requiremesnt is how may question types you expect this to work with, and some idea about how you, as a teacher, would expect to enter the scoring information. Obviously it is best if you can come up with one general idea the works for all question types (but perhaps with a few tweaks for some of the question types). Is negative scoring controlled on the quiz editing form or the question editing form? If you get a negative score for each question, do you get a negative score for the whole quiz, or is the quiz score always rounded up to zero in this case. Note: I am not sure that the Moodle gradebook can cope with negative scores. I think the final score should be limited to be between 0 and the maximum score for the quiz. (Scoring zero on a quiz is probably demoralising enough for the student already.)

This is proabaly at least 4 weeks work. 1 week to thrash out a detailed design (probably with more than one week elapsed time); 1 week to go round all the question types making the necessary changes to the editing interface and answer marking; one week working on the main quiz and question bank code to make sure the negative scores returned by questions are processed properly; and at least a week testing quizzes that use all question types, with one or many pages, with and without each attempt builds on last, checking that you have not broken adaptive mode, etc.


2. This is smaller and more self-contained. I would do this a quiz report, which is one of the smaller and simpler types of Moodle plugin. The report could just request the review page for each quiz attempt, with 'Show all on one page' selected, and save the results in a sub-folder of the course files area. Probably in a subfolder of the backupdata folder, which is restricted to teachers only. (That is why question exports are stored in there.) Then finally, it could combine all the exports into a zip file. Obviously, there would need to be a bit of user-interface to controll the process. The only tricky bit is that the quiz review pages need various images and stylesheets to display properly. Perhaps the plugin should rely is wget or equivalent to do the downloading. Depending on how robust the finaly solution is, and what sort of other tools it relies on, it might not be incorporated into the quiz, but instead live as a third-party plugin in the modules and plugins database and contrib CVS. Anyway, this might only be a week or two's work.


3. This is the hardest one to estimate. If you can find the forum thread I alluded to above, then there might be very little to do beyond a bit of testing. However, if you have to start from scratch, I don't really know what the best solution might be, and so can't guess how hard or easy it might be.

Hi Tim,

1. Totally agree. I simply decribed our local minimal requirement but think we should go for the comprehensive solution if at all possible, which means full compatibility with all possible option sets.

2. More or less agree, but don't think it is a fundamental problem. -- Input by other users much appreciated here. True negative raw scores (negative percentages don't seem to make much sense should be possible or at least documented somewhere (e.g. in the detailed response report) before they are truncated to 0. This would make it easier to gage the extent of the student's "problem" in one glance and provide some kind of audit trail.
What do you think?

Regards,

Pete

Great, that plug-in does the job, sorry I hadn't found it.
Thank you for the swift response, much appreciated

Hi Tim,

I feel none of my messages were actually duplicates, they were all very specific to the threads and none of them was irrelevant to the topic being discussed in the thread. All the threads I posted to were open threads without any solution of the issue being discussed. So I tried giving the people a possible solution. I don't know how  you count them as spam. A google search should help, (https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+spam&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab#). The keyword here is "irrelevant".

Still if you restrict me to one post that's fine I will make one post to just one thread of my choice. You can delete the one here.

Yes we plan to upload this plugin to Moodle plugins database (along with some others that are under development) but it needs some polishing before we publish it for the public. The current state is very specific for our needs and not even easily installable as it depends on some utilities that need to be installed at the server. Also the plugin publishing process seems to be a lengthy one here. So we are working on that and we will share it with the community but that will take some time. Currently what we can do is that we can tailor it according to the needs of some other schools who need similar functionality and install it on their Moodle ourselves which was the purpose of my posts in the threads where people were looking for a similar thing.

Thanks.