Intro

You may be aware of the fact that it is not possible to delete a score slide, once it has been inserted automatically because you created a quiz. It will become 'hidden'. For normal slides that means it will not be included in the output of the Captivate file. However, you may also know that quiz and score slides are bit 'special', because they have embedded objects (no timeline) and a lot of inbuilt functionality.

You need to be careful with that Hidden score slide, as a user in the forums experienced. Read on, if you want to discover another secret of the Score slide.

Problem and Solution

User didn’t want to show the score slide after a quiz, but created a a slide to jump to in case of Success, and another in case of Failure. Setup of the Quiz Preferences are visible in this screenshot:

The default way of achieving this is to click the Continue button on the score slide. But the user didn’t want to show the score slide. It is not possible to delete the slide but it was hidden. A slide which is hidden normally is not part of the published output. However Quiz and Score slides cannot be considered to be ‘normal’ as you’ll find out. His problem was that, whatever the result, the first of the two custom slides was always shown. Hence his complaint that the actions were not working.  Try it out, use this example published file and you’ll see that you always are navigated to Failure slide, which is the first slide, even if you have a 100% result:

Wrong setup

When I heard that the user didn't use the score slide, guessed the origin of the problem. It is due to the very special ‘status’ of the score slide, even when it is hidden. The Filmstrip of the previous example looks like this:

Correct setup

I moved the score slide in a position before the slides Success and Failure.

Why did this fix the problem? Quiz is considered finished when you reach the score slide, even when it is hidden. Now the quizzing system variables have their final value, including  cpQuizInfoPassFail which is responsible for the choice between Passing Grade and Failing Grade. When the score slide was after the Success/Failure slides Captivate expected more questions to come and didn’t evaluate that variable.

Another way of solving the problem, bit more work, is:

• Keep the score slide visible, but always before the custom Success/Failure slides.
• Use the On Enter event of the score slide to trigger a conditional action, checking the value of cpQuizInfoPassFail, navigate to the Failure slide if its value is 0, to the Success slide if it is 1. No need to set the Quiz Preferences actions in that case. And you automatically skip the score slide, learner will not see it.

Conclusion

Never trust the word 'hidden' if it is a Score slide!