If you have a quiz with some multiple choice questions and an essay questions and allow multiple attempts, if you go to the "Results > Grades" report and select "Show only attempts that are graded for each user (Highest grade)" you will only get the first attempt, not the highest.

The problem is because of the fix for MDL-3936, in which there is this comment:

Fixed in 2.1 dev now that MDL-20636 has been integrated.
If there are any un-graded essay questions (that are worth more than 0 marks) in a quiz attempt, then the total grade for this quiz attempt is not calculated yet. This is normally displayed to users as 'Requires grading' where the score would otherwise be printed.

The problem is that if you have an instructor who only wants to grade the essay question of the highest scoring quiz attempt that is now very difficult or almost impossible.

I tried the workaround of setting the essay question to have a score/mark of 0, but now the instructor can only comment on a essay question and cannot score it at all (which is expected).

Can the quiz exclude an essay question from score calculation (rather than counting it as 0)? Or is there a better way to solve this particular use case?