will discuss with Tim

And I had Tim advice on this..

See this thread for more information: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50903

Is there a time frame for fixing it?

I noticed recently that the manual grading area doesn't reflect groups either.

So far we have worked around this by adding the question texts as Cloze type questions with 0 points and an empty drop-down or similar as the aswer text. This way the question texts can be randomized. Then the answer can be taken in with a non-randomized essay question (that has no question text at all). But obviously having this bug fixed would make things easier.

IIRC the Description type questions can't be randomized either, so the Cloze-hack mentioned above is used.

In our Moodle install, we have an instructor who wants to create a quiz composed entirely of essay questions and have it be randomly pulled. It is extremely fustrating for the instructor to see the error message that states that there are no questions available in the category. To have an error message that says essay questions cannot be randomized is a lot better that telling them that there are no questions avaiable, especially when the instructor knows it is there.

To use:

1. Apply the patch to a recent 1.9.3+ test installation.
2. Go to Admin -> Miscellaneous -> Experimental and turn on the option 'Random questions can use manually graded questions'.

How it is supposed to work:

They key point here (in addition to the admin setting) is ensuring that the random questions show up in the manual grading report, but only if they actually need manual grading. And then that manually grading them actually works. (Manually grading random questions from the attempt review page has worked for some time.)

What needs to be tested: (If possible, test with Admin -> Server -> Debugging settings turned on to full, and report any errors/warnings/notices seen.)

A. That it works when you have a category of
i) all essay questions.
ii) some essay and some non-essay questions
iii) all non-essay questions.

B. That it works both when selecting both
i) questions just one category
ii) questions from a category and all its categories.

C. Nasty situations like this: Create a category with one essay question and five short-answer questions. Explicitly add the essay question to the quiz as a non-random question, then add two random questions from the same category (which will then pick from the remaining 5 questions). Ensure that the essay question still shows up in the report, but the random questions don't.

D. People who can test on a COPY of their production site with a huge question bank would be greatly appreciated.

Just to be clear in cases A i) and A ii) the random question should appear in the manual grading report. In case A iii) it should not.

In case A ii) when you go in to grade a particular question, all student's attempts at the random question, both the ones where that student got an essay, and the ones where they got something else, should be shown in the manual grading report. I know that is not ideal, but that is what is possible.

Note that in Moodle 2.0 there is no option. Essay questions are treated just like any other question type by random questions.

The main performance impact of this is that it increases the work required to display the manual grading report - one extra DB query per random question in the quiz. Worse if the random question selects from subcategories too - but that is no longer the default in Moodle 2.0. I think that is acceptable.

This fix was checked in to MOODLE_19_STABLE on 28/Nov/08 by Tim Hunt so it is in Moodle 1.9.5. One way to see the commits that have been associated with a particular tracker issue is to click the version control tab above. Also, this bug has been marked resolved with resolution fixed. In 1.9 with the fix, there is an admin option to turn it on.