Best Practice: Using Question Pools

Question Pools are a powerful feature which can bring complexity and variety to your courses. Here's our best practice guidance to help you become confident in setting them and helps you get the most out of using them.

Resetting question pools

The default behaviour for question pools is that once your learner has submitted their score by reaching the last page of the module the question pages that have been randomly selected will reshuffle.

For instance, I have a module setup with 4 questions, a, b, c, and d. My pool is configured so I can only see two of those questions and I am using the default behaviour of question pools where they re-shuffle on the final score being sent.

If my learner views the module and sees questions a and c on first attempt, they then submit their score by reaching the last page of the module, but then go back to attempt the module again, they will now see a different set of questions, perhaps b …and… c, or a …and… d, any manner of random combinations!

This behaviour means that the learner will be asked different questions on re-attempting the module.

You can turn off this behaviour by pressing 'Configure', 'Scoring' and de-selecting this option:

….doing this will mean that once the question pages for the question pool have been selected they will not change.

Here's a detailed flow diagram of how the logic for this feature works:

Question pools reshuffling on course open

Please note that if a learner exits a course which has Question Pools and then re-opens the course, the Question Pool will re-shuffle, the users score will also reflect the score they had previously attained for the reshuffled questions.

For example, if I have a pool with 10 questions that is set to display 50% of the pages and my learner leaves the course, then re-opens it the score will change according to which questions have been randomly selected.

Here is a diagram to illustrate how this works:

 

Note:
  • We strongly recommend only having one question pool per Project.
  • We recommend that you do not include the first page of your course or the first page of a chapter in your question pool as this will prevent the questions from being randomised. Consider having a splash page at the start of your course or chapter and then your questions if you are looking to create a very short course.
  • When working with question pools it is easier to calculate the percentages if the amount of pages in the question pools is even.
  • It is not possible to change the 'Percentage of pages' that you want to display once a Question Pool has been created.
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