Summer Change: A Few Fixes to the Quiz Generator
As part of the changes for the summer project, the Quiz Generator received a little attention, and three changes of note were made:
- If a student loses their connection to the course Web site (or the Internet), a warning appears at the bottom of the screen informing the student of the situation. This most frequently happens with students on wireless connections. Wireless connections are generally re-used and changed between individual laptops as the nearby network access point sees fit. This can be a problem in situations where a student is taking an online quiz/exam, because when the connection is automatically switched by the nearby network access point, the course Web site no longer understands who the student is because when the student started the exam, they were using a different Internet connection. Students will now receive a warning if this happens, and can take appropriate action.
- If a quiz has one or more manually graded questions that are excluded from scoring, and there are no other questions in the quiz that require manual grading, the quiz is now automatically scored and students can see their results immediately. This means that an exam with 45 multiple choice questions and a fill-in-the-blank for the student to "sign" the ethics pledge can now show the student their results immediately and requires no intervention on the part of faculty/TAs to grade the exam.
- If a quiz is set to have a time limit above 120 minutes, a warning is given about the unreliability of student network connections to a single Web page for more than 120 minutes.