Moodle

I tried it today (May 28) and it seems the problem is still alive. Can you explain me why I am wrong?

Which version did you just try?

current 1.8+ updated in date 28 may 2007

Just updated via CVS to 1.8.1+. Feedback is still not showing in question review mode. Works fine in a quiz preview.

The point is that at the moment, general feedback is only shown after the essay is graded. That is true for all question types, but with manually graded questions, it does not make such sense.

However, why can't you just put all the feedback in the other Feedback box?

There may be some situations where it is useful to have some feeback shown immediately, and the rest only after the question has been manually graded.

OK. Feature not bug.

In that case, I'll resolve this.

Tim is there another ticket got created and mark this as a "feature request" instead of bug? If no may I reopen this ticket and mark it as a possible "improvement" now so that it would be still on developer's radar? Thanks!

Personally, I see this one as a bug. The key is that when you create a new quiz, instructors are being offered for "Review options" (see attached screenshot) and one of the option is "Immediately after the attempt" the students get to see the "General feedback." It did not say that the general feedback is always ONLY shown after the essay is "graded" by instructors. If this is true, then that checkbox in the "Review options" for [General feedback] under the "Immediately after the attempt" column has no use then. Just my $0.02.

Reopen this as possible "improvement" (although personally I think it should be categorized as a bug, see my previous comments)...Tested with the latest 1.9.3+ codes (build on Nov 20 2008) and the problem is still there.

Yes, it is OK to reopen this issue.

The problem we have is that too much of the same code is trying to handle computer-graded questions and manually-graded questions, and that makes fixing this, and other manually graded bugs, quite hard.

I have some ideas about a good way to fix this (that would be a major change). I really must get around to writing it out, so other people can review and comment on it, and I can try to persuade Martin to let me do it.

Iagree with Wen Hao - this is absolutely a bug. The Review Options checkboxes in the quiz settings should control when students see all of the different types of feedback. Isn't that why they exist?

Not only that, but if this is going to be classified as a "feature" and closed, the language on the essay question creation page should be changed to indicate that General Feedback will not appear until after grading. As is, this is incredibly confusing and frustrating for faculty who have spent hours setting up quiz questions only to have to go back and move all of their General Feedback into the Feedback box, one question at a time.

Yes, this is a bug.

I now have started to document my plans for the how the quiz should be changed to allow a whole lot of bugs like this to be resolved properly. See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Changing_the_Moodle_Question_Engine (comments on that welcome, probably best in the quiz forum, even though it is incomplete).

In the mean time, I have plenty of other things to do, so am unlikely to work on this myself. If someone comes up with a patch to make things better in the mean time, then I will make time to review it, and commit it if appropriate. I can see two approaches in the short term:

1. Change the question type, so that general feedback is shown once the quiz attempt is closed. If you do this, you need to test both adaptive and non-adaptive mode. You also need to give a convincing argument, alongside your patch, why no one will mind if we change the current behaviour. (I have not thought it through in depth, but someone might like the way this question type currently works, and not want it to be changed. Perhaps this needs to be discussed in the quiz forum. Perhaps I am just being too paranoid.)

2. Change the working on the question editing form, to teachers understand the current behaviour of this question type.

Just a note to say that in my question engine rewrite (for which the correct link is now http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Question_Engine_2) this is already fixed. Essay questions only have one feedback field on the question form (it is General feedback), and that feedback is shown on the review page as soon as the quiz is submitted, you don't have to wait until the teacher grades it.

Something we could consider in the meantime, until what looks like a fantastic engine rewrite is part of the standard release, is to change the help documentation/wording so that teachers can figure it out a little easier on their own. Adding some information to the help doc of the General Feedback field would be a big help for a helpdesk team member like me. Such a line could read:

"Please note that the General Feedback field will not appear to students until after a manually-graded question (like the essay) has been graded by the instructor. If you wish to display instant feedback for a manually-graded item (that is to say, before you get to grade it), use the Feedback field instead of the General Feedback field. This functionality is subject to change as the quiz engine is continually revised."

How easy is it to modify help docs? This makes me wonder if maybe I can just add that to my own site.

Thanks for all of your work, Tim. LM

To modify the docs, you just need to edit the appropriate .html file. In this case lang/en_utf8/help/quiz/generalfeedback.html.

Note that your changes will be overwritten each time you upgrade (unless you are using some sort of version control system for the code).

This bug prevents both "Feedback" and "General feedback" when the answer to the question or the whole quiz is submitted by the student, i.e. there does not seem to be a way currently to give any feedback to the student before the essay is commented on by the instructor.

So the proposed information doc would not give the true situation and so be no less misleading. The documentation should say it as it is - There is a bug on essay answers which prevents feedback to the student until the instructor has commented and graded the answer.

Since many of my questions require essay answers, this reduces the average speed of feedback and thus learning considerably.

In any revised version, I should like the option to provide feedback to the student as each question is submitted and not to wait (perhaps a couple of days) until the whole quiz is submitted.

Is there any eta on this bug fix?

I agree that rapid feedback is important.

This bug is already fixed in my rewrite (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Question_Engine_2) which will be part of Moodle 2.1. No one has a time for that.

It will only get fixed sooner than that if someone else devises a fix that I can be sure will work, and will not break anything else.

Fixed in 2.1 dev now that MDL-20636 has been integrated.