Modifying Quiz Questions after Attempts Were Made
- Luc Richard
If one or more learners have taken the quiz, you will see a list of all the questions in the quiz and a notice saying that you cannot add or remove questions. You can change the grade for a question (the scores for all learners will recalculate immediately), preview an individual question and click on a question edit link that will allow you to directly edit the question stored in the question bank.
Be very careful when editing questions! It is OK to make small changes (e.g. fix a spelling mistake or change the grade for a partially correct response) but if you make a major change (for example deleting a choice from a multiple choice question), then you may break the existing quiz attempts. After editing questions in a way that affects the grading, you will need to re-grade the quiz.
Dealing with Faulty Questions
There are several ways to deal with "bad" questions in a quiz.
Edit the question, changing what you will accept as a correct answer, then regrading the quiz. Regrading will only affect one quiz at a time.
Edit the question to explain the situation to the learners and then set the grade for the question to 0. After you make such changes you should regrade the quiz by clicking on the Results tab and then the Regrade tab. This will change the grade for all students who have taken the quiz so far. Remember, if the question is used by another quiz, your "explanation" will appear as part of that quiz as well.
You can change the grade for the bad question and then move or delete the question from your question category. The question will still appear on the quiz. Some organizations do not like to delete any question, so they will move them to a "bad questions" category instead.
When you discover a bad question in your quiz, it may affect the question bank. Remember that a final might be made up of a certain number of random questions drawn from different question categories, the same categories used in a smaller subject quiz. It can be very important to do something about bad or invalid questions in a question category when the categories are used in other places.
Other Suggestions
You can delete all quiz attempts by learners and then edit the quiz as if no students had attempted it. To do this, click the quiz name and then the Results link in the Administration block. This will present a list of learners and their scores. Click "Select all" and then "Delete selected attempts". It's important to understand that this approach will permanently delete any attempts made by learners and they will have to re-do the quiz.
Important Notes
The attempts for a quiz are not deleted unless you explicitly do so as per the "Other Suggestions" above. In other words, editing quiz questions will not delete the attempts. It may however change someone's grade and as a result, make them pass or fail.
When modifying a quiz that is used in the calculation of the learning record, you should consider the impact on the existing learning records and determine whether or not some records need to be voided because they were erroneously granted.