Moodle - Multiple Choice
- Matthew Harrington
Moodle supports multiple choice questions as part of their quizzes. Multiple choice questions allow two types of input - single-answer (radio buttons, what is called multiple choice and single-select problems in Open edX), and multi-answer (checkboxes). The question is entered into a separate input field with a WYSIWYG HTML editor from the options, which are entered on a single line. Moodle quiz questions have the option of having a ‘Penalty Factor’, which reduces the score of learners for every incorrect attempt they make, allowing even negative scores to be possible.
Shuffling answers is an option, but positions cannot be fixed, and answers have three states - correct, partially correct, and incorrect. Three types of feedback are possible in the Moodle editor:
Answer-specific feedback is displayed when certain options are chosen, and appears next to those options.
Combined feedback appears based on the overall score of the submission - correct, partially correct, and incorrect - and appears at the bottom of the question before any general feedback.
General feedback appears regardless of the submitted answer. This is most commonly used to share the location of content related to the problem for revision purposes, and appears after all other feedback.
Default settings for Multiple Choice questions can be set at the site level by a site administrator, or set for a single problem within the editor for that problem or quiz.
There is a secondary tool called the “Calculated multichoice question”, which adds the ability to use variables that are shared by all other calculated questions in the same quiz. For example, “What is {a}*{b}” could share the same variable “a” with another question asking “What is the radius of a circle with the circumference of {a}”, ensuring continuity between questions.
The implementation of the Calculated multichoice question may indicate that extending the question types available to Moodle is complex and not ideal for developers, as instead of adding this capability to multiple choice questions, they opted for a whole separate question type.
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