Adapt Learning Community: Restricting assessment attempts

Hi all

I'm a bit confused about the "_attempts" setting in adapt-contrib-assessment. I set the value in my test course to 2 and uploaded it to my Moodle 1.9 test site (also specifying 2 allowable attempts in my course settings within Moodle). However, this setting seems produce unexpected results...

1) I failed 2 attempts and the 'retry' button disappeared as hoped. But when I closed the course and re-opened it, no matter how many times I failed the assessment the 'retry' button was there.

2) I also tried hitting "F5" after my first 2 failed attempts and was then allowed to retake the assessment as many times as I wanted.

Really what I'm tring to achieve is that if a user fails the assessment twice, no more attempts are allowed and the course is reset to 'not started' so the user has to retake the course before attempting the assessment again.

Does anyone know whether this is achievable at all (either all set up from within adapt, or would this all need to be set up in the LMS somehow, or a bit of both?)

Thanks. Chris

If you want to have an assessment with a restricted number of attempts you need to configure the Spoor extension to store the user's responses to questions via the _shouldStoreResponses setting.

I'll update the README for assessment to make it clear that's needed.

I don't think you want to go messing with the number of attempts in Moodle when you're handling the logic for that in Adapt; I would leave Moodle at 'unlimited' attempts.

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Thanks Matt. I set the following Spoor attributes:

"_tracking": {
"_requireAssessmentPassed": true,
"_shouldSubmitScore": true,
"_shouldStoreResponses": true,
"_shouldRecordInteractions": true
}

but I'm still encountering the same issues (see points 1 & 2).

As I said, really what I'm tring to achieve is that if a user fails the assessment twice, no more attempts are allowed, hitting F5 doesn't reset the assessment and allow more attempts, and the course is reset to 'not started' so the user is forced to retake the course before attempting the assessment again. I'm guessing this is more on the LMS side of things.

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what do you have as your _onAssessmentFailure setting?

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"incomplete"

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Hmm sorry I don't know then.

The reason I asked about the onAssessmentFailure thing is that some LMSes will automatically create a brand new attempt at a course if you relaunch after setting either 'failed', 'completed' or 'passed'. I know Moodle can have a habit of doing this.

As you are using Moodle, do just verify you didn't check 'start new attempt' on the course entry page - cause if you did then every time you refresh it'll start a new attempt!

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Thanks Matt.

I have to say I'm not a fan of all this locking learners out, forcing them to do things a certain way, but a client asked me about the possibility of forcing a learner to retake a course if they fail the assessment twice.

Thanks for pointing out "_onAssessmentFailure" though. Perhaps if I specify "_onAssessmentFailure": "failed" they can configure their LMS lock the user out and reset the course to 'not started'.

Either way, as I suspected, it looks like this type of thing would need some configuration of the LMS as well as Adapt.

Thanks again.

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Unfortunately I think there's a bug at the moment in that if you set "_onAssessmentFailure": "failed" then Adapt won't wait until you've used up all your assessment attempts before setting "failed"...

It certainly should be possible to restrict the number of attempts that the user has at the assessment but you may have to install the current master branch of the assessment extension so as to pick up this fix - we haven't been able to release an updated version of assessment yet as the changes have a dependency on a new release of the framework. And we haven't managed to release that yet because we're still trying to get everything finalised for the big end-of-ie8/9/10-support release of the framework! Hopefully should be done over the next few days - I really want to get it sorted before I go on holiday next Tuesday but between busy times with Kineo project work and people finding new issues that need sorting it's proving quite challenging...

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Thanks Matt. Much appreciated. Good luck with everything.

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