Ray Morris

After contributing a bit to the quiz module and other parts of Moodle, and making available some quiz related plugins, I am now moving to a different job, where Moodle isn't used. (I'm going back into the information security field). I've enjoyed meeting everyone and working with some of you.

If anything comes up with modules I've published here or whatever feel free to create new versions or whatever, don't wait for me to reply on any tracker issues I've been involved in, etc.  The new person who replaces me at my job may or may not be involved in the Moodle community very much, I don't know.

"out of order" or not, the simple fact is that there are three effective ways of reducing cheating:

1. Include some randomness in which questions each student gets (ie pick three from this category, two from that category)

2. Set Moodle to randomize the ORDER of questions, so students can't say/remember/write down the answer to question #1.

3. Set Moodle to randomize the order of the ANSWERS (for multiple choice, etc.)

Whether or not it offends any particular person, these days everything is posted online. . So the fact is that if you ask the same questions, in the same order, with the answers in the same order, for years, a large percentage of your students will have a cheat sheet marked 1: A, 2: C, 3: A, 4: B.  And there's nothing you can do about it.  You want to detect cheating in that situation?  Mark all students as "cheated" and you'll be right most of the time.  Sorry if that makes you sad, but it's the truth.

Would you feel better if we lied to you and told you running a report would do any good?

You could set your completion requirements to require EITHER the quiz, or dummy activity X.  The dummy activity could be a Page activity type or whatever.  Here we use a label-like activity that we added completion to.   Then on the dummy activity, set it to be visible only to students who don't have to take the quiz. 

It probably wouldn't be that hard at all to do type-in text search.  Boolean expressions would take a bit more time. If you want NOT, you may as well also have AND and OR, so you can do similar words with OR, while limiting the results with AND.

>  Moodle doesn't have a tag hierarchy (it has to cater to a wider need rather than just medicine), probably there is no other way around.

FYI that's actually a fundamental, definitional property of of Tags which was established long before Moodle supported tags.  Moodle has categories, which are a hierarchy, and tags are separate from categories because tags are by definition incompatible with categories. The whole idea of tags is that they are not context sensitive.  So someone in a different school can mark something "photo" and "lion", and that's true without context - it's always a photo and always a lion.  That's useful to anyone, anywhere looking for a lion picture. Compare to hierarchy like Biology 102/ Textbook/Figures/Chapter8/ .... If you hide it under Chapter8/Figures/, that's only useful to people working in that textbook, and working on chapter 8. That loses the usefulness for 99.999% of potential users.  Tags are intended as a communication mechanism, a way for you to use information added by someone else, anyone else.

I like the concept of having the most frequently used at the top.  After the first three or four, it might quite arbitrary though. 

Two possibilities come to mind.  First, the same behavior as the "Save As" dialog in many operating systems - default to the last used.  So if I'm creating a bunch of multiple choice questions, multiple choice is at the top and preselected.  Then the rest in alphabetical order, or grouped or whatever doesn't matter.

Another possibility that comes mind is:

#1 most popular
#2 most popular
#3 most popular

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