Adding Activities

8.8. Testing your quiz

The course manager and teacher roles give you enhanced permissions for editing the quiz, however these roles do not give a fully representative view of what the learner will see of the quiz, as the editor preview mode for each quiz question does not use the same visual layout as the learner gets of the quiz (and does not replicate what the question looks like on a mobile device).

Therefore, it makes sense to test the quiz with another account which has permission to view the draft course as a learner, using the reviewer role.

Some actions to take during quiz testing

Test a quiz to check if the questions are behaving as you would expect, for example is feedback or hint text appearing when expected, does each question display correctly on the screen? It is a good idea to test in mobile mode as well.

You can create a test account, login to OpenLearn Create with that account in one browser, then in another browser while logged in with your main account, manually enrol the test account onto the course and give it the ‘reviewer’ role. Then, with the test account, go to the course URL and the test account should be able to see the course content including the quizzes in learner view mode. 

1. With your test account, when testing the quiz (and deliberately choosing wrong answers if you know the right answers), check if too many hints have been provided in relation to the number of answer choices available (a common mistake). If necessary, with your main account, reduce the number of hints to reduce the number of tries, and adjust the penalty percentage as appropriate.
2. With your test account, deliberately select the incorrect answer to questions a few times, to test how the questions behave and what, where and when messages appear for learners (feedback and navigational messages). Your main account could be used to delete all these test attempts of the quiz, especially if adjustments need to be made to questions during testing or if you have enabled a time delay on repeat attempts of the quiz.
3. With your test account, test the quiz in mobile responsive view, ie use the browser developer tools to display the quiz in mobile mode. This will expose any quiz questions which do not display well, for example drag and drop boxes with long sentences will fall beyond the display space and force a scroll bar to appear, which is not a good user experience for learners. This type of problem might mean the question needs to be redesigned to work better on a small screen.

If a quiz has a pass grade applied, you will also need to do the following checks:

1. With your test account, attempt the quiz and see if the marks and grade awarded appear to be calculated correctly. For example, the total number of marks for the quiz might be 7 and the pass grade is 50% but the total score achieved is 3.5 yet the calculations are not showing that you have achieved a pass. If this is wrong, with your main account check that the Maximum grade and the pass grade have been entered correctly and update if necessary, then refresh the test account view of the quiz review screen and see if the grades and percentages are now correct.
2. With your main account configure overall feedback messages at grade boundaries, then test to see which message you get when your test account achieves a score close to the pass grade boundary. Although the Moodle.org guidance for overall feedback at grade boundaries tends to use rounded percentages (e.g. 50%) for a pass/fail boundary, in practice recently we usually set it to 49.9% for the fail message rather than 50%, as during quiz testing in the past we’ve sometimes received the wrong feedback message for a quiz attempt which has scored the pass (50%).