Ray Morris

They can also just switch to a different desktop (on most operating systems).  They could instead set their favorite browser to say it's SEB.  That's takes about two clicks for computer geeks who have the user agent switcher already enabled, or six clicks for someone who has never done it before.  There are probably six or seven ways to get around it, even without getting into anything sophisticated.

Really, it's all kind of like the latch on a bathroom stall - it tells people what behavior is expected, but in no way is it secure in any sense of the word.   Safebrowser is really just a strong suggestion letting students know they aren't supposed to use Google during a quiz. If they decide to break the rules, there are a dozen ways for them to do so, many of them simple.  That's an administrative and cultural issue, not a technical issue.

 Of course, you might ask yourself - am I testing knowledge that the student will need to have immediately in mind in the real world, and not be able to check a reference?  Let me use myself as an example.  Myself, I've been programing professionally for 17 years and I have reasonably impressive credentials to say I'm competent.  I look up programming syntax  and such several times every day.  Testing how well a programmer can do when they aren't allowed to use reference material is silly because actual programming work does use reference material constantly.  Encouraging the student to use reference material is a much better test of real world competence because in the real world the person who uses reference material most effectively does the job most effectively.

All that to say, in many (most?) cases trying to prevent students from referencing outside sources is a futile attempt to make your test WORSE, to make it NOT represent how the student would need to use the information in the real world.

* As a contra example, fighter pilots should immediately know, off the top of their head, what to do when they've been hit by opposing canon fire.  No time to check the manual  or cheat sheet when you're being shot at.  Even in most other emergencies, though, pilots DO pull out the checklist, so for accurate results ONLY the "gunfire" quiz would not be open book.

Hmm, that gets me thinking.  In real world application of knowledge, generally you can't refer to a reference in extremely urgent situations.  If you can spare a few seconds, you can whip out your smart phone and check.  So perhaps use that fact with quizzes - if you expect the students to be able to answer in a split second, set a really tight time limit.  If you don't mind if it takes them 30 seconds to answer, perhaps there's no reason they can't use that 30 seconds to check reference material.

Please let us know what you find out.

> (1)  Is it okay to import all questions into the TOP category for question bank?

That seems messy, but it should "work".  I'd create subcategories under the top category.   The right category structure can avoid the duplication on backup / restore.  More on that below.

> (2)  Does using the Move feature Move them, or simply COPY them to a sub-category?

I'm fairly sure that "move" moves them.  If you wanted to double check, you could create a question, move it, then see if you see two copies.

> the same template course is backed up and restored
> repeatedly.  I have noticed a few things:  this causes the questions
> in the question bank to multiply so we have dozens of duplicates that cannot be deleted;

That's a known issue which is being slowly worked on. It's a hard problem, though, because the flexibility of Quiz makes it hard to know when duplicates will occur and when they won't.  You can avoid creating duplicates by using a certain procedure, though.

As you were perhaps thinking, you can move your questions to categories outside of your course and I think that will avoid the duplication.  That is also logically correct - you are using the same questions for "different" courses, so the questions should not be in the course pool.  (At least not for the way you're defining a "course".)

Then have the quiz use the bank outside of your course.  You _may_ have to set it to use a number of random questions from the proper bank, rather than selecting specific questions.  Note that doesn't mean you would dump all of the questions into the top level category.  Instead, you would create a new category named for your course and add questions to that.   That is, you'd create a category to use that's not WITHIN your course, but is NAMED such that huamsn can tell it's for your course.

I may be wrong that this would avoid backing up and duplicating the questions, so try it with a few and let us know if it works okay.

I see two different questions.  The subject line asks about average grade.
The body of the post asks about the percentage of attempts which have a grade higher than some number.


The question in your subject line (average grade), I believe you could find a setting for that.  

For the question within your post (percentage of attempts with a passing grade/above some arbitrary grade), you'd probably need to use the ad-hoc reporting module (or create custom report).

I'm curious about this as well.  Here, we're pretty hesitant to delete anything, so we've been configuring things, and submitting patches, to make it work well without needing to delete information.