Suggest Totara Learn features

TL-8885 - All-or-Nothing Multiple Choice Questions

Welcome to this forum!

One of our partners has been in touch with the following suggestion for the Quiz Activity:

We have noticed when creating Totara Quizzes, when we have multiple choice, multiple answer it will allow users to choose whatever number answers as they wish to. For example:

Question: Please choose 4 correct answers?

a. correct (25%)
b. correct (25%)
c. correct (25%)
d. correct (25%)
e. wrong (-100%)
f. wrong (-100%)

In most instances this works when a learner selects 4 answers, if they click all 4 correct they get 100% and pass that question, if they select 4 options and one of them is wrong they score 0, which means they fail that question.

The issue becomes prevalent when a user selects 1-3 correct answers which will score them 25% each time. If a user does this for a number of questions then they will pass the quiz when in actual fact it is designed so that they should fail.

Is there something that I am missing in Totara quiz settings. If there isn't an option I would suggest that there could be an option within the multiple choice question that either a selected number of options have to be chosen to move on or a certain number of options have to be chosen or a learner will get 0%.

There is a Moodle plugin for this but it's not clear whether it's still being maintained. https://moodle.org/plugins/qtype_multichoiceset

Permalink | Reply

We use that Moodle plugin (on 2.7) and it seems to work perfectly. Would obviously prefer if it was incorporated into the default Multiple Choice as an option for scoring, but as an interim it works fine on our version.

Dan

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Suggestion: Use a minus % for each incorrect choice. That doesn't rely on an unsupported plugin.

There's an issue for this in the Moodle tracker, the more people that vote for it the more likely it will be implemented in (Moodle) core.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi all, was searching to see if this was in the suggestion for Totara Learn features.

We're having to get the 3rd party plugin installed as well, because like Tom mentioned in the initial post the issue is around when someone does not choose all the correct answers:

"The issue becomes prevalent when a user selects 1-3 correct answers which will score them 25% each time. If a user does this for a number of questions then they will pass the quiz when in actual fact it is designed so that they should fail."

It would be great if this option could be implemented as part of Totara Core.

Thanks

- Matt

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Matt

If you require the grades to be all or nothing when choosing a number of options worth a percentage and e and f being incorrect then you could use the options

1 a, b, c, d - 100%

2 a, b, c, e - 0

3 a, b, d, e, - 0

4 a, b, e, f - 0 or -100%

This would also prevent the problem with naming two wrong answers and getting -200%

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Thanks Craig for the response.

Whilst that does work and has been our solution some of the time, the challenge is that there are 15 different permutations for 4 correct answers out of 6 possible answers (at least according to my maths), and so we don't want to have to put in all 15 choices. Having an 'all-or-nothing' option eliminates the need to come up with the variations ourselves.

Thanks

- Matt

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Matt

True there are a lot of combinations but you don't necessarily have to include all combinations.

You may not be concerned with differentiating between someone getting 3 right and 1 wrong or 2 right and 2 wrong. They could both be given a grade of 0 and only when an answer has the choice with the 4 right answers do they get a grade of 1.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Not sure if I get you right.

In my opinion your suggestion is inacceptable because it doesn't work at all. The quiz sums up all points for all correct choices for the final grade which means you pass the test even if you did not answer question correctly because you missed one or more choices in question.

Totara considered this being a bug in the past. It did work in version 9 and 12 as expected as all-or-nothing. With version 15 this bug is back again. In addition, the default instruction says "Choose all that apply" which assumes to be an all-or-nothing type of question.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Angela

The suggestion was made to simulate an all or nothing question where all of the options need to be correct to be awarded 100% and 0 otherwise.

Only the first option in the multichoice question that has all of the required answer combinations would receive a grade of 100% the other options would receive a grade of 0% so wouldn't reach the quiz pass mark.

The all or nothing question is a third party plugin so it is not in Totara's control . This plugin was confirmed as working in Totara 13 so if this behavioujr is required then this can be used . If the bug with this plugin is back in Totara 15 then the provider of the plugin needs to be contacted to fix rather than Totara

regards

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

I assume, you are working with version 15 and up. In previous versions (at least in 11 and 12), this question type was always all or nothing. Anyway, in Moodle there is a question type called All-or-nothing which we used in version 9 because of the issue you mention. I agree with you - Totara should come back to how the question type behaved in version 12 at least. We have to change a good bunch of questions. It is a mess.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Craig,

The idea you suggests works functionally, but from a UX/ease of use for the learner it isn't ideal. The user would need to continually review the options in the question text and if they are longer than a few words; it becomes highly frustrating for the user.

It has raised an interesting conversation around the office about what constitutes 'correct' - should the learner get some marks for the parts they get correct? Though there are definitely times when you would like the question to mark as one rather that just its parts. A good example is chemical or formulas, just naming a single part correctly doesn't assess understanding.

The reality is, there are benefits to both ways of marking a multiple response as correct and we should have the choice of either when building assessments and knowledge checks.

On a side note; this issue of questions marking complete based its parts, is also found throughout any question that has multiple answer options (e.g. drag and drop, select missing and matching to name a few).

Cheers

Scott

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Scott

Thanks for your feedback - I have passed this onto the product team to see what can be done.

I agree that using this with options with lots of words would not be a good user experience.

Cheers

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Scott

We have confirmed that the all or nothing type question from the third party plugin works with Totara 13 with minor layout issues and this will be considered for including in core Totara