The quiz settings page has a 'questions per page' option where you can select an integer, or 'unlimited'. This gives the impression that quizzes are automatically paginated.

Well, if the option 'shuffle questions' is turned on, then they are automatically paginated.

But if the shuffle option is off, then they are actually manually paginated. The quiz 'questions per page' option then only has an effect when a new question is added. On the quiz editing page, there is a tick-box 'show page breaks' that can be turned on. If you do, you can then see where the page breaks are and move them up and down. With the check-box on, there is also a dropdown that can be used for repaginating the quiz. That is only only effective way to change the questions per page option after questions have been added to the quiz. Changing the quiz settings dropdown does not trigger an automatic pagination.


Anyway, it is horribly confusing, as evidenced by several bug reports and forum posts. And I have been thinking about the quiz for months, and only just understood all the intricacies myself. We need something less confusing. I suggest:


On the quiz settings form, we add the option 'manual page breaks' to the 'questions per page' dropdown.

If one of the current 'questions per page' options is selected (unlimited or n) then the quiz is always automatically paginated, and the 'show page breaks' option and the other options it hides are not available.

If 'manual page breaks' is selected, the page breaks are always shown, and the manual repaginate dropdown is always present, and when new questions are added to the quiz, no automatic page breaks are added.

It is an error to try to select both 'shuffle questions' and 'manual page breaks' at the same time.

When making this change, all existing quizzes will be analysed for where the page breaks actually are. If the page breaks are uniformly spread, then they will be set to that automatic pagination value. If the page breaks are irregular, they will be set to manual pagination.

At the same time, I propse to change the default setting for new quizzes to 'one question per page' becuase I believe that pedagogically it is best for students to concentrate on one thing at a time.

And if only one question per page is shown, I propose to change the paging bar, so that instead of 'page' is says 'question' (and references to description items will be referred to as 'info', not given a number).