Quiz Settings

Summary

This article will go over common quiz setting questions by setting category.

Timing

Open the quiz:

You can specify times when the quiz is accessible for people to make attempts. Before the opening time the quiz will be unavailable to students. They will be able to view the quiz introduction but will not be able to view the questions. Quizzes with start times in the future display both the open and close date for students.

Close the quiz:

After the closing time, the students will not be able to start new attempts. Answers that the student submits after the quiz closing date will be saved but they will not be marked.Even after the quiz has closed students will still be able to see the quiz description and review their attempts. What exactly they will see depends on the settings you choose for review options (see below).

Time limit:

By default, quizzes do not have a time limit, which allows students as much time as they need to complete the quiz. If you do specify a time limit, several things are done to try and ensure that quizzes are completed within that time:

1. A countdown timer is shown in the quiz navigation block
2. When the timer has run out, the quiz is submitted automatically with whatever answers have been filled in so far
3. If a student manages to cheat and goes over the allotted time, no marks are awarded for any answers entered after the time ran out

When time expires:

Note: It is always the case that if the student is actively working on the quiz when the count-down timer reachers zero, then their attempt will be automatically submitted at that moment. This setting only affects what happens if the student starts a timed attempt, then leaves the attempt, and then later time expires.

There are three options as to what will happen when the time limit is up. Choose the one you need from the dropdown menu:

1. Open attempts are submitted automatically (This is the default)
2. There is a grace period when open attempts can be submitted, but no more questions answered
3. Attempts must be submitted before time expires, or they are not counted.

If you select "There is a grace period..." then you can check the box to enable the "Submission grace period" and specify a period of time during which learners may still submit the quiz after the time is up.
Note: You can change quiz availability and duration for different groups or users in the Group or User override sections in quiz administration.

Layout

New page:

For longer quizzes it makes sense to stretch the quiz over several pages by limiting the number of questions per page. When adding questions to the quiz, page breaks will automatically be inserted according to the setting you choose here. However, you will also be able to move page breaks around by hand later on the editing page.

Note: Changing this setting has no effect on questions you have already added to the quiz. The setting will only apply to questions you add subsequently. To change the page breaks in an existing quiz, you need to go to the quiz editing screen, tick the 'Show page breaks' checkbox, then use the repaginate control.

If you have many questions that use many high definition images and the server suffers performance issues, showing only one question per page is easier on the server than showing many (or all) questions on one page.

Navigation method (available by clicking Show More):

Choose Sequential instead of Free, if you want to force the student to progress through the questions in order and not go back to a previous question or skip to a later one.

Question Behavior

How questions behave:

This is the primary way to control the experience a student has as they interact with each question in the quiz. If you want students to get immediate feedback on their response with a chance to try again, if they get it wrong, then select 'Interactive with multiple tries' (and add some hints to your questions and specify a retry penalty if desired). If you want to replicate a traditional exam, select 'Deferred feedback'. In other situations, the other options can be useful. For a description of all the behaviors, see Question behaviors.

Allow redo within an attempt (available by clicking "Show more"):

If using Interactive or Immediate feedback mode, enabling this setting means students can try a question again even if they have used up their allowed attempts. This is helpful if they wish to learn from the feedback given at the end of their attempts. Importantly, for students to continue with the same question, the question definition must contain hints. It must also have been added manually into the quiz, rather than randomly (see Building Quiz#Adding questions). Otherwise, the 'redo' will occur with a different question from the one they were working on previously if there are other questions available (such as when the question slot is filled by a random question). A student's grade for that question slot is based on the most recent question they have started. Note: by default students are allowed three tries to answer a question correctly in Interactive mode before the 'redo' option becomes available. The number of tries cannot be reduced but it can be increased by adding more hints to the question in the 'Multiple tries' section of the question's configuration page.

Each attempt builds on the last (available by clicking "Show more"):

If multiple attempts are allowed and this setting is set to Yes, then each new attempt contains the results of the previous attempt. This allows the student on the new attempt to concentrate on just those questions that were answered incorrectly on the previous attempt. If this option is chosen then each attempt by a particular student uses the same questions in the same order, independent of randomization settings. To show a fresh quiz on every attempt, select No for this setting.

Review Options

This section controls what information students will be shown when they review their past attempts at the quiz, and during the attempt in adaptive mode. It is a matrix with check boxes.

The various pieces of information that can be controlled are:

The attempt will show how the student responded to each question.

Whether correct displays whether the students response to each question is correct or incorrect.

Marks reveals the marks awarded to the student and the grade for the quiz. 

Specific feedback will show the feedback for the response to the answer as set when adding the question to the quiz. Each response to a question can have feedback for both correct and incorrect answers.

General feedback displays the general feedback for the whole question as set when adding the question to the quiz. You can use the general feedback to give students some background to what knowledge the question was testing.

Right answer reveals the correct answer to each question, whether the student answered correctly or not.

Overall feedback displays feedback for the entire quiz as set in the quiz settings.

For each of the above items, you can determine the timeframe when the students will see them:

During the attempt is only available when ‘How questions behave’ has been set to ‘Immediate feedback’, ‘Immediate feedback with CBM’ and ‘Interactive with multiple tries’. If set to one of these options then a ‘Check’ button will appear below the answer and when clicked the student will submit that response and then receive immediate feedback.

Immediately after the attempt means within 2 minutes of the student clicking "submit all and finish".

Later, while the quiz is still open means after 2 minutes, but before the close date (if the quiz does not have a close date, this phase never ends).

After the quiz is closed means what it says (you never get here for quizzes without a close date).

Tip: Checking any of the boxes in the timeframe row, will reveal the test to the student. For example, to allow students to see their quiz immediately after taking it but not later, make sure none of the boxes in "Later" or "After" rows are checked. The student will be able to see their grade but not get into the quiz.

In your list of review options, you must have 'The attempt' (the first option in the lists) selected before you can enable the options to show 'Whether correct', 'Specific feedback', 'General feedback', and 'Right answer'. If you choose not to let the students review the attempt, your only options are to display 'Marks' and 'Overall feedback'.

The default settings are set to not allow students to review the quiz or see their grade until the quiz is closed. This prevents students from sharing quiz answers with another student.

Extra Restrictions on Attempts

Browser security:

This is by default an advanced field, visible by clicking "Show advanced". The options in this section offer various ways to try to restrict how students may try to 'cheat' while attempting a quiz. However, this is not a simple issue, and what in one situation is considered 'cheating' may, in another situation, just be effective use of information technology. (For example, the ability to quickly find answers using a search engine.)

Note also that this is not just at problem of technology with a technical solution. Cheating has been going on since long before computers, and while computers make certain actions, like copy and paste, easier, they also make it easier for teachers to detect cheating - for example using the quiz reports. The option provided here are not fool-proof, and while they do make some forms of cheating harder for students, they also make it more inconvenient for students to attempt the quizzes, and they are not fool-proof.

Full screen pop-up with some JavaScript security:

There is a limit to what the quiz, which runs on a web server, can do to restrict what the student sitting at their computer can do while attempting the quiz. However, this option does what is possible:

• The quiz will only start if the student has a JavaScript-enabled web-browser.
• The quiz appears in a fullscreen popup window that covers all the other windows and has no course navigation controls. (However, it is impossible for a web site to create a browser window that cannot be minimized or moved aside.)
• The students are prevented, as far as is possible, from using facilities like copy and paste.

Other Quiz Settings

If your question was not answered by this article, check out the Moodle docs on quiz settings.