With many students attempting the quiz (potentially multiple times), you may like to exercise some degree of control over which attempts are retained and also over how many times a quiz can be attempted. This post focusses on the different options available to you and suggestions for how different scenarios can be managed.

Quiz setting: ‘Attempts allowed’

For a Moodle Quiz, the default configuration is that students have Unlimited attempts for the quiz, meaning they can retake the quiz as many times as they wish, regardless of their score. This may sometimes be acceptable for formative assessments, but often you may wish to restrict the number of attempts.

Within the ‘Grade’ section of the ‘Quiz settings’ page, the setting ‘Attempts allowed’ will determine how many times a student may attempt the Quiz:

Deleting attempts

There may be a number of reasons why you may wish to delete attempts; for example, you may wish to tidy up the quiz results report by removing attempts which you may have done via test student accounts, or perhaps there was a internet connection issue during a student’s previous attempt which meant the student had lost valuable time during a timed attempt.

To remove attempts, this can be done on the ‘Quiz results’ page, accessed via the ‘gear’ icon within the initial Quiz page:

Once the results are displayed, you can select an attempt by ticking the checkbox to the left of an attempt (1, below) and then scrolling to the bottom to Delete selected attempts (2, below).

Granting extra attempts

Again, there may be a number of reasons why you may wish to grant extra attempts.

One typical reason may be due to technical issues during a previous attempt which meant that the student may not have performed as well as they could have done. In this situation, the easiest solution is to delete the “rogue” attempt (see previous section: ‘Deleting attempts’) which will then allow the student to re-attempt the quiz as the limit for quiz attempts has no longer been reached.

If it’s not appropriate to delete a previous attempt, then individual students/groups of students can be granted extra attempts using the User and Group overrides features of the Quiz activity: the TELSupport article, How do I set up different rules for specific students in a Quiz? explains how to use these features.

Regrading attempts

Occasionally you may find that a question has been configured incorrectly and perhaps marks are being awarded for incorrect answers. Even if a quiz containing that question is “active” (ie. can be attempted by students), it is still possible to edit the “rogue” question and correct the grading; subsequent attempts will apply the now-corrected grading but what about previous attempts?

There are a few options available:

• You could check each attempt and correct the marking for individual instances where the question had been marked incorrectly;
• You could manually override a student’s final grade for the Quiz activity in the Gradebook;
• You could choose to regrade existing attempts.

The last of these options is simpler than you might first think (although I should point out that, from personal experience, this option should be avoided if you are correcting Matching questions).

Having corrected any questions that have been incorrectly configured, you would then select the attempt(s) that you wish to be regraded by ticking the checkbox next to the attempt (1, below) and then select Regrade selected attempts (2, below).

On returning to the results page once the regrade has been completed, the attempt is now updated with the question having been regraded (A, below) along with the overall grade for the attempt (B, below) – the original grades are also displayed but with strikethrough:

If you wish to regrade all attempts there is the Regrade all button (A, below) at the top of the results table:

Prior to clicking the Regrade all button, you may wish to first click on the Dry run a full regrade button which allows you to see the effect of a regrade before it is actually applied; this will display the marks in a similar way to the “strikethrough” seen earlier and you can then choose whether you wish to apply the regrade or keep the grades as they are.