I'm testing quiz 4 (alpha 3 now) extensively this week, and there's one thing that is becoming apparent that I really don't know how we could fix best.

the issue is that you *very* easy generate a lot of revisions and a lot of result, even before the quiz is ready to be taken by a student. I just started out fresh with adding new questions to a new quiz, and before the quiz had any questions assigned I had generated around 15 results and 4 revisions of this quiz.

Revision "generating"

This happened here as I edited some smaller stuff in the edit page of the quiz, like wording in the description, dates available, and some minor settings. If you do this and hit submit a new revision is created. This is because the "create new revision" box is ticked by default, and it's very easy to overlook this.

I think a better default behavior could be to show a message on the edit page with wording a-la "If you change fundamental parts of this quiz you should consider creating a new revision", and leave the box checked off by default? This is also important as creating a new revision of a quiz *by accident* will create problems on the reports and statistics page, as they will be grouped after the revisions, and you have no way of merging the results / data from one revision into another revision.

Result "generating"

Every time you hit the "view" page on a quiz that is considered a take, and you typically hit this page many times when creating a quiz, partly due to issues like #628870: When adding a question via "manage questions" you should be taken back to the same page - to get back to "Manage questions" from here you typically need to find the quiz again (= you hit the view page), then click manage..

Also, a take is started even though the quiz have no questions assigned to it. This also have some interesting side effects as a student can take a quiz the allowed number of times set by the quiz just by refreshing the quiz page that has no questions :)

I believe some (many?) of these problems this could be fixed by simply checking if the quiz has questions assigned or not, and not start a quiz if there are no questions.

Alternatively, some way of marking a quiz as "ready for production", and nothing is stored to the database before that is done, nor is any revisions on questions or quiz created..?

Comments

falcon’s picture

falcon commented
Assigned: Unassigned » falcon
Status: Active » Needs work

I think we'll try to fix the underlying problems here, and then do another evaluation on how we can help quiz creators to remember to create new revision if they change something that may effect the scoring of the quiz. I think that if everything else works perfectly the auto revisioning system should stay the way it is, but we'll see when we get all the other issues sorted out.

These issues are AFAIK:
- Don't allow a quiz to be taken if it has zero answers
- Don't consider a quiz as in progress when a quiz is being viewed. I think we need a start page that shows some information about the quiz, and a link with "take quiz"
- More?

falcon’s picture

falcon commented

Note to self: When creating a brand new question the new revision checkbox is marked...

falcon’s picture

falcon commented
Category: task » bug
mckooter’s picture

mckooter commented

- Don't consider a quiz as in progress when a quiz is being viewed. I think we need a start page that shows some information about the quiz, and a link with "take quiz"

just a comment on this one, idealy it would be best if it could not start a quiz untill the first question is submitted. this way it wouldnt require a start page (as in my case i wouldnt want one, it seems simple but i do have a need for one without it), i havent looked at exactly how the quiz is "Started" in the code yet but im guessing a hidden form element or an if statement to ensure its not question 1 would work in "starting" the quiz.

just my thoughts

falcon’s picture

falcon commented

Thanks for your thoughts mckooter! We will avoid a starting page then, and consider a quiz as in progress when the first question has been answered.

falcon’s picture

falcon commented
Status: Needs work » Needs review

Fixed by following the tip from mckooter. Please test.

vegardjo’s picture

vegardjo commented
Status: Needs review » Closed (fixed)

Good one, tried this and it seems to be fixed now! :)

falcon’s picture

falcon commented

@mckooter, I hope you can find the time to comment on #507664: Move quiz-taking UI into a Take tab. If you have a usecase where the changes made in #507664: Move quiz-taking UI into a Take tab is a drawback we would like to know about it.

mbutcher’s picture

mbutcher commented

FYI, revision is checked by default because not doing so can have nasty implications when scoring is done on a quiz when a question has been changed after the user has taken it. There are almost no use cases where the revisions box should be unchecked. I'm not kidding -- bad things can happen to the scoring if you uncheck the box.