Awesome Plugin

Hi Frank,

I just noticed something else on the newly-renamed Quiz Result Page. The answers to the questions do not appear in the same order that they appeared on the quiz. They seem to appear in the order that they were originally entered as questions into the question bank. This is maybe a minor issue, but if it can be corrected easily…

Thanks,
Jeff

Hi Frank,

I see that you’re still busy working on this plug-in. I tend to go in fits and starts, so it’s great to see that you have greater stick-to-it-ivness than I do!

After your latest update, I ran into a bit of a serious problem that I thought you should know about. When I loaded the quiz, the time showed as 0:00, and I was unable to enter any answers. (i.e. it timed out as soon as the page loaded.) When I clicked on Submit, I was given my score: zero. When I clicked on my browser’s back arrow, I went back to the quiz, and everything was as it should have been the first time. That is to say, the timer was counting down, and I was able to enter my answers.

In case it matters, I made this quiz 2-3 weeks ago, so it was made quite a few updates ago.

If I may, I also have a suggestion and a question:

First, I’d like to suggest that the timer becomes part of the results page. If a test is being timed, then it is obviously a factor in the test, and so it seems to me a good idea that it should be reported with the results.

Also, you wrote a while ago that you’re working on a way to import question from an Excel spreadsheet. I’d like to get going in the project I’m working on, but of course I don’t want to waste time or effort if it can be avoided. Do you have a target date you’re looking at for adding that functionality, or, failing that, do you have a format you’re looking at? If I knew how you were going to design the spreadsheet, that would be enough for me to start getting myself ready.

BTW, I don’t mean at all to impose myself on you, but if you’d like, I’d be more than willing to be a sounding board for designing this functionality. I’m useless to you as a programmer – it was all I could do to change the colour of the text on my post-test messages, but I do have a bit more of a background with Excel.

Thanks again for all your hard work!
Jeff

Hi Frank,

I’m just on my way out the door. It’s a long weekend here in Canada; one of the last vestiges of British rule, Victoria Day, is tomorrow, so I’m off to the lake for a day.

I’ll update and test as soon as I can, probably tomorrow.

Thanks for the tip about the timer. Yeah, that makes sense.

Thanks again for all your work, and for getting back so quickly.

Jeff

Hi again, Frank,

Listen, I REALLY hope this doesn’t come across as being too forward, but I was doing some thinking today about the fact that you’re still in the conceptual design phase of the importing system, and there’s something I’d like to share with you. The reason I’d like to share this with you now is because I know from my (very limited!) experience with Excel at work that if you are designing with the end-product in mind from the beginning, it can make things a lot easier.

<Digression>
In a classic example of the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind, I’ve been asked to do a few things with Excel at work, and just when I get them done, I am asked if I can make this change or that change. I try smile so that they can not hear me grinding my teeth in frustration as I think, “If I had known that that was what you wanted, then that’s what I would have done, but since you didn’t tell me …” My mind usually clouds over at that point, and I have to leave the office for a few minutes. Anyway, enough about me.
</Digression>

Please take this for what it is: a suggestion. If is isn’t possible, it isn’t possible. But if it is, I thought it best to mention it to you before you get too far along.

In a (rather large) nutshell:

I’m planning on building a site centred around a) teaching a certain body of material, and then b) building a set of quizzes around the material I have just taught.

These numbers and descriptions are somewhat simplified for the sake of this explanation, but basically:

There are 10 chapters in the book I want to teach. Each chapter will have a bank of 20 Multiple Choice questions (which I will write). When a user requests a quiz for one of the chapters, 10 questions will be chosen at random from that chapter’s question bank. QMN is already set up for this. I can already set up 10 distinct sets of question banks for 10 distinct chapters. So far, so good.

Here is where it gets a bit complicated.

When the user is finished all ten chapters, they will want to have a “final quiz” which includes questions from all ten chapters. (I want to re-use the same questions I used for the chapter quizzes to make the final quiz.) For the sake of balance, an equal number of questions should be taken from each chapter.

For example, of the final quiz has 20 questions, there should be two questions from each of the ten chapters. If the final quiz has 40 questions, there should be four questions from each chapter, etc.

Thinking about the situation, but not knowing the actual nuts and bolts of how it works, two possible solutions to this problem seem to present themselves.

First, I would have to build a new set of questions, which basically means re-entering the previous questions into a new quiz. If all of the questions are re-entered into a single, separate bank of questions, there needs to be a way to ensure that the number of questions from each chapter is equal (or adjustable, depending on the test maker’s wishes). This would mean adding an extra field (perhaps called “category”) which would allow the test maker (me) to assign a value to each question. According to my earlier example, I would assign a value based on which chapter that question came from. (All questions from Chaper 1 would be “category 1”, all questions from chapter 2 would be “category 2”, etc.) The ability for the test maker to weight the number of questions that appear in the final quiz, based on their category, would be necessary for this approach to work.

The second approach, which would potentially be easier for the test maker (me), but perhaps a while new level of hurt for you, would be to make a meta-quiz generator. Obviously, the same requirements still exist, but ideally, the test maker would simply(!) be able to make a test based on existing question banks, and then weight the number of questions (based on which question bank the questions came from) according to his wishes. For example, I could tell the meta-generator to make a quiz with 40 questions, and to use question banks 1 – 10 to do this. Further, by way of percentages or absolute numbers, I could tell the meta-generator where to pull the questions from. (e.g. 10% of the questions in the final quiz come from chapter 1, 10% from chapter 2, etc.)

Does that make sense? I hope so. If not, let me know where I lost you, and I’ll try to explain more clearly.

Again, I’m writing this in hopes that you’ll be able to decide if this level of customizability is something you want to pursue, and, if it is, that you’ll be able to design the program with these capabilities in mind from the beginning, rather than trying to jerry-rig retro-fit them later.

All the best,
Jeff