Dr S Bhatia

while I was typing that a moodle guru is required, Joseph posted you the right Hack solution.

It's a fair deal EXCEPT

that I am quite sure (being primarily a quiz user) that those 2000 questions that they want to import must belong to 20 different categories. So it'll be a hell of a job to re-import them category -wise from myquestions_shuffled.xml

So a suggestion.....

Question Name:
A question name can be specified by placing it first and enclosing it within double colons.

     ::Kanji Origins::Japanese characters originally
     came from what country? {=China}

So just ensure that you name each question before doing the Joseph-Rezeau-manoeuvre

and in naming each, name the category so that later you know where to shift what

e.g. 

::Cat-1 Q-1::Japanese characters originally
     came from what country? {=China}
::cat-3 Q-2::The American holiday of Thanksgiving is 
     celebrated on the {~second ~third =fourth} Thursday of November. 

This way afyter you xml them , you will easily be able to put them into specific sub-folder categories

ok

did a bit of research
Yes, you guys are right and I was wrong(partially).
Quiz overrides if question says shuffle answers yes but quiz setting says NO
But when vice versa happens, that is question says no but quiz says yes, the quiz does not override.

The logic must be: You may have a quiz in which some questions you may wanna shuffle answers while in others you don't wanna do it. So quiz setting doesn't shuffle the questions with no setting. This way you may have both type of questions- shuffled options and non-shuffled options

If you ask me, actually it is a very thoughtful feature done in by someone coz in some type of questions, we try to use the psychology of the student by presenting him with a myth first and right answer later (e.g. 1000 ml of water will have minimum volume at 0 degrees, -32 degrees, +4 degrees, +8 degrees.....in this Q, I would definitely not like the 3rd answer to be shown before the first option)

But it's quite irritating when you wanna do it in 2000 imported questions.
Some Moodle Guru is required to help.....Joseph !! Tim!!?

Your contention is bang-on Anthony

BUT

whenever a software is created for public, any standard notification is usually very broad in its sense so as to apply to the maximum number of people.

Therefore

If we change it now to anything, you will find people clamouring for the older string or even a newer one.

OPTIONS:
Simply hack the file and change the string in YOUR version. I don;t know how to hack. Ask Tim or Chris

Option2: Just add 'Click all that apply' in the instructions for the quiz. Students are not that dumb and we are not fighting a legal battle with them for accuracy of the sentence.  I use moodle mainly for quizzes and I feel it's OK to say click at least one coz I write instructions at the beginning of quiz.

....I can finally get words to import - along with many unwanted characters - and all my questions come in as one question. What am I doing wrong?

Hit 'enter' at the end of every question so as to leave a clear line between each question while preparing them in text format otherwise they will all get imported as one question.


I'm a mac user
should I be using text edit? then I only have 4 choices to save as: RTF, HTML, XML
Can't I just use word or excel? The questions are already typed in those formats.

Well, use the simplest text editor that you can and save as .txt
I THINK using Word should also be ok.....as long as you 'save as' text.
But best is plain text editor, such as "vi," "pico," or "Notepad."

Breatless in anticipation......for 1.7

( on a serious note I wonder if I'll actually upgrade from 1.6.1 to 1.7 considering that i am still constructing parts of my new moodle site under 1.6.1. By the time full site will be functional, you guys'd be talking about 2.3 or 2.4.......well, softwares are like girlfriends....you usually try to get the latest one and the moment you get it/her, you see a better one round the corner.....GAWD )