How to override quiz settings for a user in Moodle

Bob was absent yesterday and has to make up the test. Jane didn’t do so well and you want to let her have a second attempt. You’re only giving students 10 minutes for the quiz today, but Chris just needs a few extra minutes.

What you need is a user override. Not sure when this was added to Moodle, but I found it while setting up my Moodle 2.7 server for next year; and it looks like something that will get a lot of use.

The basics are that you can give a user, or a group, slightly different restrictions on a Moodle quiz.

Setup

Your quiz should be setup like your normally would. Put restrictions in place for the bulk of your students. 1 attempt, due at 5pm on Jan 1st, 10 minutes to take it, whatever. However you would normally setup the quiz.

Now go to the quiz and look under the Administration block. You should see a link that says User overrides. Click that. There’s also a Group overrides right above if you’re overriding for an entire group.

When you click on the overrides link you’ll be taken to a page for the quiz overrides with the name of the quiz and a single Add User Override button. Click that button.

Setting the Overrides

The next screen you’ll see is a list of students along with the overrides that you can put in place.

From this screen, select the students that you want to assign overrides for. You can hold down Control while you click to pick more than one. And then select any settings that need to differ between your selected students and the default quiz settings. The override screen is automatically populated with the main settings for the quiz.

Click on Save, or Save and enter another override if you have more to do. After that you should be back to the page with the Add User Override button. But this time you’ll see the user, or users, that you added overrides for along with what’s different between the normal quiz settings and the override.

Looking forward to this year

For me, I’ll probably use this for students that miss a test. In the past I’ve just gone in and changed the close date to the day they come in and make up the exam. But an override for just that student seems a lot cleaner.

But my most common use will probably be opening up exams for retesting.

I’ve always been a fan of allowing students to have a second chance to prove that they know the content. Maybe Kristi just was having a bad day on the day of the test. Or Jill who had 4 tests on the same day. Doesn’t matter why. If they can come back and prove they know their stuff, they know their stuff.

That said, I tend to test out of large banks of questions. My ideal test comes out of a bank with at least twice as many questions as show up on the exam. So, while there may be some overlap between the original and make up exams, it’s not exactly the same.

Overrides look like an ideal way to allow a second attempt for those that need it while still keeping a default limit of one.