Peter Ruthven-Stuart

Tim, as mentioned above Mac IE is now really old.

I wouldn't try to fix this problem. Mac IE obsolete, so I'd tell Mac users to use another browser. For Max OSX people there are lots of choices out there. For OS 9 people, I seem to remember that Netscape 6 worked.

Hello Peter

I'll try to answer your 2 questions about the Quiz module:


Use the asterisk symbol: *

For example, in a short answer question you could create the following question:

In the answer section of the short answer editing window you could indicate the answer as follows:

However, as you have pointed out, this means that students have to type exactly the same words, spaces and punctuation to get the answer right. So, in order to give those students that get the word order correct, but not necessarily the punctuation or number of spaces correct, you need to type in the correct answer as follows:


The * (asterisk) symbol represents anything. The advantage of using the * symbol is that all these answers would all be correct:


However, the problem with the * symbol workaround as written above is that all the following answers are also correct:


Anyway, as a language teacher, my policy re short answer questions is to give students the benefit of the doubt, rather than penalise students who may have in fact pretty much got the answer correct. If you want to be stricter in allowing what is right, using the above example, you could use the * symbol as follows:


You also wrote;


How does it look awkward? It seems not only sensible, but imperative to include all possible correct answers.

Your second question:


If you want to have 10 questions all in one item, then you need to use the 'Embedded Answers (Cloze)' type questions. However, I would suggest that it is better to make separate items for each question for the following 3 reasons:

1. You can jumble the order of questions
2. You can jumble the order of choices - for example, in multiple-choice questions
3. You can reuse individual questions in future quizzes. If you use the 'Embedded Answers (Cloze)' type question and want to reuse the questions, you'll have to reuse all 10 questions.

One way to speed up the question making process is to use the GIFT import feature. When writing many questions, this can significantly increase the speed of the question making process.

Hope this helps.

By the way, I if you have any more questions re quizzes, the best place for them will be in the Quiz module forum.

Penny, thanks for this reply.

Here's a follow up question re meta courses. You wrote:


Does this mean that there are two sets of grades?

Imagine the following scenario. Student-A belongs to French 101 which is a sub course of meta course called 'Languages'. Both of these courses have tasks that are graded. Are the grades that Student-A gets in the meta course 'Languages' also recorded in the subcourse, or does the teacher have to manually transfer grades from the meta course to the sub course?

Mike, thanks for your reply and apologies for causing you extra unnecessary work.

The new version of the Questionnaire module now seems to be working; it is allowing restores to occur .

However, in my defence, straight after uploading the new Questionnaire module, I tried to restore a course and did get the negative results as explained above. However, when I tried again a few days later, it worked fine. Is it possible that the old version got somehow 'stuck' in a cache or sometifn similar?

Any way, no problems now, and thank you for a great module.

Hello,

I have set up my Gradebook with 4 categories, one of which I want to be 'extra credit'. So, I want the grades for the 4 categories to be distributed as follows:

Category	Grade
Category A	5%
Category B	45%
Category C	50%
Bonus Tasks	+ 5%

I would like the tasks in the category 'Bonus Tasks' to be treated as just that; tasks that students can do to boost their grade. This means that the total grade students can get should be calculated as 100% (5 + 45 + 50), but with the possibility that students could increase their grade. Because of the way I grade certain tasks, it will never be possible for students to get 105% .

I realise that in the Gradebook their are things called 'Bonus Points' in the 'Set Weights' section, but as the help file indicates this is not the solution:

• Bonus Points: Is used to give extra points that do not change the point total for a category. This can be used to adjust for unfair questions or similiar. These will be applied equally to all students. If you wish to selectively provide extra credit; add a new graded item and set it to extra credit in "Set Categories".

There is also an 'Extra Credit' feature in the 'Set Categories' section. However, again this is not the solution:

• Extra Credit: Check this box if you would like a particular category to be calculated as extra credit. Please note that setting all items to extra credit for a particular category will have unexpected results, and will most likely not count the category or extra credit at all.

So, is there a device, feature or workaround within the present grading system that will allow me to set up a category, which contains a number of tasks, as an extra credit category. In other words, none of the tasks in the category need to be done by students, but if done, will increase their final scores.

Any suggestions or advice will be much appeciated.