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I have attached a small patch that allows for late submissions by duplicating the preventlatesubmissions functionality of assignments. There is, however, no penalties applied to late submissions.
Would it be possible for this patch to be released as a plugin module. I have access to be able to apply plugins and I can text edit a specific file, but am not able to apply this patch.
I am migrating over from Etudes which does have the ability to set both a due date and a close date for quizes and this capability is totally necessary for my courses (with or without penalty). For those who might be interested in this fix but who do not have access to patch.exe, I was able to easily use the patch file to patch the relevant files manually in Dreamweaver. Any good text editor that displays line numbers could be used.
I intent to apply penalties manually by adjusting scores based on actual submission dates but this will be a bit tedious. It would be nice to see some development push for a feature that allows late submissions with variable penalties (e.g. 1% per day late, 10% per day late, 5% one day late then another 1% per day therafter). Since I am totally new to the Moodle community I am not sure how such a development push might be brought about. I have been using the patch listed here because it is absolutely essential to retention efforts in my classes which include many underprepared or disadvantaged students. If the first quiz deadline in a class was absolute, many students would miss the deadline and then drop the class. If I extend any deadline, students will expect all deadlines to be extended and will not perform.
Using the quiz submit late patch has worked well to maintain student retention but there are glitches including resetting of the clock in multi-page quizzes' whenever the student clicks from one page to the next. I am very disappointed to see that the current demo versions of 2.0 do NOT address this issue at all. Student retention may not be an issue for many colleges but it certainly is for many of us. Since Sakai/Etudes has had functionality to deal with this issue AND to allow students to have extra time on tests (those who may have learning disabilities) for at least 2-3 years now, this issue should be relatively easy to address and VERY HIGH on the REQUIRED features list. It appears that Sakai/Etudes are much more responsive to the entire range of student needs, especially the "low" end than the Moodle development community is - exactly the opposite of what I believe is intended. If nothing else, the simplest fix would be to allow the instructor to edit the closing date that appears to students through the quizzes link page display. We can put a "fake" last day to submit date in the text of the quiz information but that is subverted because the real close date appears to students who just click on the quizzes link. Is it possible, at least as an interim fix to simply allow instructor override of the information appearing under the "Quiz closes" column on the quizzes display page - preferably for 1.9.3 but definitely when 2.0 hits the streets.. There is no easy or interim fix for this, and no, it has not been addressed for Moodle 2.0, but many other things have, and we can only do so much.
I agree that it would be good to fix this some time, but so far there are only two votes here. This probably needs ot be considered in combination with MDL-3030, which is the other side of the coin. And I cannot promise when anything will be done about this, I have plenty of other problems (with lots of votes) that need to be fixed first. Actually there is an easy fix for the main issue of late submissions being allowed. It is exactly almost exactly the way this was done in Sakai/eytudes 3 years ago. here are the basic steps.
1) Set up new variable "timedue" (to add to the existing "timeopen" and "timeclose" quiz variables. If done this way, absolutely NOTHING changes with regard to how the quiz close date functionality issues are addressed and NO other changes are needed until there is time to do things like add aotumatic penalties for late submission and, my biggest wish after the quizdue fix, the ability to easily set quiz time limits for specific students. I do not program in php but I am pretty sure that, if I lknew the existing Moodle structure well (I do not - I only started using it this year) and if it were in a language I do program in (Java, cgi, etc), it would take only a few hours at most to write, and fully test this fix. I should edit my post so appologies for the typos. The oone that is important is that in step 4 I missed out the word due when I typed "Show quiz date".
Probably a bit longer than that to test properly, becuase it involves a database structure change (new column). Anyway, that is half a day of time I don't have.
Also, it is adding an extra field to a form that already is too long, for a use case that only affects a few people. That trade-off means that doing this change in the standard Moodle release is not a no-brainer. Anyway, if you can program in Java, you can probalby work out how ot implement this in Moodle, since it is mostly doing similar things to what is already there. If you give it a go and can come up with a patch, please attach it here. Not so sure this affects only a few people. I believe many instructors would use such a feature once they found what it can do to improve student retention - a huge issue in colleges in many nations and certainly in most 2 year colleges in the United States. Why do I believe it affects a lot of Moodle users? It is not just a gut feeling or my won needs. My information comes from being in the Sakai/Etudes development community and having observed how extensive the use of this feature became and how much push for more functionaily came from large numbers of users once the late submission technique was first introduced there.
You are right that I could probably program this fix myself. I expect it would only take a few hours of my time. However, to do so, I would need to set up an entirely new and unique Moodle (which I may indeed do even though I do not currently have the appropriate server testing environment). My existing implementation, although it is self-administered and used only for my own clases, is an active site with 200-300 students working on the site each day - 24 hours a day - 7 days a week - and I can not take that offline until next summer when there will be a couple of weeks break for me to work in. If I do develop a fix I will, of course, post it here but it will unfortuntely only be manual patching information not a patch file. I have been taking a more detailed look at the code and believe I could quickly and easily program the addition of a timedue date for a quiz easily and add an option to display this date on the quizzes list page rather than the time close date. This would satisfy the immediate need for me (although the other aspects of the issue - including different time limits for different students highly desirable).
The only thing I can see as a difficulty in this immediate fix is the display of the quiz close date in the calendar function. Of course, one could simply set the quiz close date to 2012 and it would be out of the way and probably unseen but it would be better if it could be simply switched off in calendar and replaced by the timedue date. Event open and close dates are reported to be automatically shown in calendar but I can not find which file has the code that does this. If anyone knows where this code is I would appreciate you sending me that info. If I have that, I can at least investigate whether I can easily make the timedue modification operate better by having the calendar show the timedue date if it exists and the timeclose date if no timedue exists. I am pretty sure the events are updated by code in mod/quiz/lib.php. Both quiz_add_instance and quiz_update_instance call quiz_after_add_or_update which does the add event calls.
If you are doing this properly, you also need to look in mod/quiz/backuplib.php and restorelib.php to ensure that this information is backed up and restored with the rest of the quiz data (and if restoring an old backup with the extra data missing, probably set due date to equal close date.) Finally, if you get all this working, please post about it in the quiz forum (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=737 I have just posted a patch file and short explanation of the fix that I mentioned. I have added an optional deadline date for quizzes. Depending on which quiz dates are set, there is now much more flexibilty. It is possible to show the student only a deadline date for a quiz, late submission is accepted and, if late, the student receives a quiz opening message that they are late and penalties may apply. It is also possible to show the student a deadline date and a later quiz close date. Of course, if the quiz deadline is not set Moodle behaves exactly as now.
Sorry forgot. Patch and more information are posted at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=737
 and titled "Add a quiz deadline so late submissions are accepted" |
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New Feature
Open
Major
Ability for late quizzes (with penalty)
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I've started working on adding this feature myself. I have the due date option working and am getting ready to take a stab at the penalty portion. I will submit it when it is complete.