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Improve Shuffling of Answer Options during Testpass

1 Requirements

At the time beeing, the shuffling of answer options during the test pass happens with every request to the question. This confuses the participants, because the options change their sequence with only a refresh of the page. Some participants gets doubtful about their given solution, because the e.g. checked boxes moves around.
 
When the question's answer options are to be shuffled for a question, this should happen only once per participant. This sequence is to be used on every presentation during the test pass.
 
Presentations of the question outside the test pass (except the question's preview) should never shuffle the answer options.

2 Additional Information

• Idea / concept: (Martin Ellermann, martin.ellermann@uni-bonn.de)
• Interest in funding: Universität Bonn
• Maintainer: (Databay AG AG, Björn Heyser)
• Implementation of the feature is done by (Databay AG AG, Björn Heyser)
• Test cases by / status: (Martin Ellermann, martin.ellermann@uni-bonn.de)

3 Discussion

BH 08 October 2014:
 
I have to figure out if it is still possible to get a pseudo shuffled sequence by the randomizer with a fixed seed per participant given when using modern php versions. If not, we have to persist this once shuffled sequence.

ME 09 October 2014:
 
Further details and a little bit of history are described here: http://www.ilias.de/mantis/view.php?id=10933
 
 

BH 14 October 2014: There is no need to store shuffled sequences permanently. The pseudo shuffling using a fixed seed per participant fully works. The only requirement is to disable the following settings in a mightly installed php suhosin patch:

• suhosin.srand.ignore = Off
• suhosin.mt_srand.ignore = Off

We would like to require both settings disabled by the ilias installation instructions, so we can switch between the different randomizing functions if we notice any issues or performance problems in the future.
 
Because the changes to the code won't be significant we would like to also integrate this feature as a usibility fix for Release 5.0 and Release 4.4.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], July 13, 2015: We highly appreciate this improvement of the way how shuffled answers of a question are presented and schedule it for 5.1. The pseudo shuffling should be done for each test run separately (to avoid the same order of answer options in different test runs). The installation instruction has to be extended and notify about the necessary settings for a possibly installed php suhosin patch. We accept the usability fix for 4.4 and 5.0.

Heyser, Björn [bheyser] 17 Aug 2015: What about the shuffling of answer options within the learning module? The serverside seeded shuffling implemantation should not be used for learning modules, since the LMs can be exorted and the server side generated shuffling would be exported once, so this once shuffled order would come up on every presentation of the question. With JS there is no way to seed a shuffling as far as I figured out. I would suggest to keep the current implementation for the learning module.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], August 17, 2015: We agree with Björn that this feature is only implemented for T&A. Shuffling behaviour will not be changed for questions in SCORM and ILIAS learning modules.

4 Implementation

When shuffling answer options for a question is activated, this happens only in case of a user has to fill out the question (test pass, preview). The answer options are not shuffled in any result presentation.

Additionally the answer options are shuffled once per context, so when you start a test pass for example the answer options for a question are not shuffled differently each time you come to this question. The answer options for this question are shuffled to the same random order for the whole test pass.

With the next test pass for example the answer options of a question are shuffled to a new random order, of course.

Test Cases

Test cases completed at 26.8.2015 by (Martin Ellermann, martin.ellermann@uni-bonn.de)

6475 : Antworten mischen

Approval

Approved at 25.8.2015 by  (Martin Ellermann, martin.ellermann@uni-bonn.de)