Review wrong answers in Quiz, skip correct answers

Intro

Similar to most Captivate developers I am busy converting legacy projects with SWF output to HTML output (in my blog). Quite a long time ago, based on questions from users, I wrote this blog post: Limit Review.  At that moment the version was Captivate 6 output was of course to SWF. If you want to view the embedded file, you'll need  Flash Player enabled browser to watch it.

I updated this blog post and created a new Example project. It is interesting to see how much easier the workflow has become, due to two new features:
  • Shared Actions: available since version 7 and improved with version 8. One of my favorite features, much underestimated by most developers for totally unknown reasons. Whereas in the old post I had to create 2 advanced actions for each quiz slide, this new version has only two shared actions, with one parameter.
  • New system variable cpInReviewMode (Quizzing category). It is a Boolean variable with a default value=0. That value will automatically be toggled to 1 when in Review mode.

Example file

I used the edited Theme, based on the Quick Start project ‘Alliance’ which I also used in my previous post with the Survey about upgrading legacy projects. HTML5 output is not as smooth as SWF output. You can compare the old post  (see link mentioned before) .

The example has 7 question slides, different types, using partial scoring and penalty. You can play the rescalable version from this link or watch the embedded one here:


Setup

Variables

This is the only remainder of the original blog.  We will be using another quizzing system variable cpQuizInfoLastSlidePointScored. The value of this variable is changing with each quiz slide. That change happens with the second step of the Submit Process.  More info about the Submit Process of a question slide can be found in this blog post.

We need to track the score for each quiz slide. To achieve that, a user variable is needed for each question slide. In this case, we need 7 user variables. No default value needed:

Labels are not so important, you just need to be able to link them to the quiz slides. If you have a shared action ready as in the first item of ‘Rare tips for Shared Actions‘ that is fine as well.

Events

All events are on the quiz slides:
  • On Enter event: will be used for a shared action EnterReviewAct. Tip: in the Advanced Interaction panel, this action will not appear (which is a pity). The reason is that the columns Success (which normally has the action for On Enter) and Failure (normally On Exit action) are used for the question actions. You can see the Usage of this action in the Library of course. Logically it has been used 7 times, because of the 7 quiz slides:



  • Success event of question (Quiz panel): will trigger a Shared action ‘ScoreQuestionAct’.

  • Last Attempt of question (Quiz panel): will trigger the same Shared action.  This action will be used 14 times. ave a look at this screenshot of the Advanced Interaction panel, where both the Success and Last Attempt events are registered:



Shared Actions

ScoreQuestionAct

This is a very simple standard action, copies the value of the system variable cpQuizInfoLastSlidePointScore to the tracking user variable. That variable is the unique parameter:

This action is triggered by both Success and Last Attempt events. It happens sometimes that you get an error, because the same parameter is used for both events. That is a bug in Captivate, which I have reported since a while, but the actions will work perfectly.

EnterReviewAct

This conditional action triggered by the On Enter event, checks two conditions:

  • Is the learner in Review mode?
  • Did the learner have a positive score on this slide? As you can see in the Advanced Interaction panel (screenshot in previous part),  I used penalty and partial scores.   Partial scored questions are counted as ‘correct’ answers in Captivate.

If both conditions are true, the slide will be skipped.

More?

Maybe you have some comments?  I don’t have a crystal ball, but feel like these two questions may pop up:

  1. Can this workflow also be used for random questions? 
    Answer is Yes: you need to trigger the shared actions for all quiz slides in the pool(s). Of course, you cannot have partial scoring, not penalty in a question pool.

  2. Can you avoid skipping partial scored questions?
    I see a way to do this, but wait for your suggestions.