Using Quizzes in Moodle

Just like with on-campus exams, you will need to set Open and Close times for your online exam to maximize exam security. Students cannot access the questions before the specified open time or after the defined close time.

The time between Open the quiz and Close the quiz is the period during which students can access the quiz questions.

For a practice session (non-graded or low-stakes), you would set this to be longer (e.g. one or more days) than the Time limit (e.g. an hour or two hours). This is to allow students some flexibility in choosing when to start the quiz. Once they start the quiz, the Time limit applies to each attempt they make. That is, if multiple attempts are allowed, students can make more attempts as long as the quiz is still open.

If you use Quiz to give a formal timed exam with one attempt, it is recommended that you set the time frame between Open and Close to be about 20 - 30 minutes longer than the Time limit. This is to emulate an on-campus exam, which requires students to start the exam at the same time but also provide a little leeway for students who might be late due to extenuating circumstances, such as server overload.

Therefore, if your exam is expected to take 1 hour and the start time is 2PM, set the Open Quiz time to 2 PM and the Close quiz time to 3:15 PM, but set the duration to 60 minutes. This means that students who have trouble logging on and start 1-15 minutes late will still have the full 60 minutes to do the quiz, but not more.

To set a reasonable time limit, you will need to think about how much time you should allocate to each question or each type of question.

The table below provides a recommended time allotment per question for some common question types.

Source: Adapted from Writing Effective Quiz Questions , Vancouver Island University

NOTE: You may want to adjust these based on your subject, your students, and the difficulty level of your questions. If you have been given a list of students with disabilities by the Access Centre, provide extended time for these students using the User or Group Override setting in Quiz.

Some issues can arise when students haven’t completed the quiz for their time is up.

• What if students completed their quiz but did not click the Submit all and finish button before time expires?
• What if students ran into a technical problem that prevented them from submitting on time?

You can minimize these risks for students by always selecting Open attempts are submitted automatically in the When time expires setting under Timing section of the Quiz Settings.

NOTE: This won’t prevent students from submitting before the time expires but will ensure all their answers are submitted when time runs out. If not selected, students risk losing grades if they do not click on the submit button within the time limit.

Moodle automatically saves students’ responses when they advance to the next page of a Quiz. If a student’s computer crashes or disconnects from the Internet, all responses on the page they are working on will be lost. With fewer questions per page you minimize the chance of students having to start from scratch when they return to the quiz after their technical problem are resolved. Moreover, if you have many questions that use high definition images, the server might suffer performance issues. On the other hand, if the student has a low-speed Internet or a weaker connection, frequent move from one page to the next takes longer for the student to complete the exam. For all the above reasons, five to ten questions per page is recommended.

If the questions are multiple choice or True/False that can be quickly answered, you can add more questions, whereas pages that have short answer or essay/type questions should fewer.

You can set the number of questions per page in the Layout section of the Quiz Settings.

In a paper-based on-campus exam, students are able to skip a question and come back to it later or revise a previously entered answer. In an online environment, you may also want to give them this freedom. You can do so by making sure Free is selected for Navigation method in the Layout section of the Quiz Settings. This is usually the default setting.

NOTE: When the other navigation option Sequential is enabled, a student must progress through the quiz in order and may not return to previous pages nor skip ahead. If you do decide to lock the navigation by selecting Sequential, you should warn your students in the Quiz description that this is the case. Students would normally assume they can go back and forth between the questions.

Students will then be able to navigate freely across questions by clicking on the question numbers on the QUIZ NAVIGATION panel.

1) Shuffle answer choices and question order

Moodle Quiz has two shuffle features to increase exam integrity. One feature shuffles the answer choices within individual questions and the other shuffles the order in which questions appear. With these Shuffle settings enabled, two students would be unlikely to see the same order of questions and responses.

Shuffling answer choices within individual questions

Shuffling answer choices only applies to questions that have multiple parts, such as multiple choice or matching questions. To make it work, you will need to enable this in two places. One is in the Question Behavior section of the Quiz Settings. It is a yes/no dropbox under Shuffle within questions.

The other is in the question settings for each individual question. It is a checkbox next to Shuffle the choices? directly above the Answers editing boxes.

Note: The reason why this setting is repeated for each question is that shuffling may create a mess for multiple-choice questions that have answers like "both a and b" or "all/none of the above". Mark this type of questions you have and make sure you go to the editing page for each of these questions and uncheck Shuffle the choices one by one.

Shuffling Questions

Shuffle between questions can be set up in the Editing quiz page, where you add new questions to your Quiz.

1. On your course page, click the Quiz name. The Quiz summary page will open
2. On the Quiz summary page, select the Actions menu gear, a drop-down menu will open.
3. Select Edit quiz from the list.

4. On the Editing quiz page, select the Shuffle checkbox in the right-hand side.

NOTE: If you have divided your questions into sections, each section will have its own shuffle button. This means questions will only be shuffled within each section (across pages if you have multiple pages in one section). You can leave the shuffle checkbox blank for any section in which the question order needs to be fixed. Otherwise, make sure you tick the shuffle checkbox for each section. It may be appropriate to put questions in sections when you have multiple questions related to a specific image, text, case study, etc.

Adding random questions

A better way to create multiple versions of the quiz is to use the random question feature in Moodle. If you have a large question bank and can identify sets of questions that test the same content area and learning objectives, you can organize them into different categories in the Question bank. So when you create your exam, you can set Moodle to randomly draw questions from each category. This is done when you add questions to your quiz just like you would normally do with regular questions. Only this time, select a random question from the dropdown menu instead of from question bank.

Warning: If you use random questions for the first time, try to consult relevant documentation or contact IITS (help@concordia.ca) to double check if you are doing it correctly. There may be some kinks with how these questions are graded.

Some faculty are concerned about students accessing exam questions after the exam, making it difficult to re-use questions in a subsequent term, so they use the Restrict Access settings or the Hide/Show icon to hide the quiz from students. These actions will indeed make exam questions inaccessible to students, but at the same will also prevent students from seeing their grades.

A better way to do this is to make sure all clickable checkboxes next to The attempt in the Review options section of the Quiz Settings are unchecked. With these disabled, questions will cease to be available to students once they submit their answers. While you are doing this, make sure Marks under After the quiz is closed is selected. Otherwise, students won’t be able to access their grade.

Note: You will find that some of the checkboxes under Review options are clickable while others are not and different checkboxes appear clickable on different occasions. This is because some quiz settings interact with one another. The screenshot above is what you will see after setting Open and Close date and time,  selecting Deferred feedback for Question behavior and removing all checkmarks for The attempt. These are all recommended settings for using Quiz to give formal online quizzes and tests . Of course, you will also want to set Attempts allowed to be 1 in the Grades section. 

If you have a large set of multiple-choice exam questions, you can write them in a text file and then import the questions into the Moodle Question Bank. There are some formatting requirements, but once you are familiar with the process, you will find it more efficient than building these questions one by one within Moodle.