MultipleChoiceQuestion: request for choice order to randomize to students

[gweinberg]

Problem

not sure if this exists yet? request for functionality to mulitple choice questions, so that the order of the choices is randomized to each student.

[So that when a class does multiple choice questions, each student is forced to read and understand the answers, not merely copy which choice in the series their neighbor selected.]

Solution

I guess in the MultipleChoiceQuestion code, you'd need an added function like "RandomizeChoices" or something, which, if toggled on, would randomize the order of the choices to students; of course the widget would need to keep track of which answer is the correct answer for each student.

In the instructor answer panel, the choices should appear in the order they appear in the code.

Maybe here's a way you could do it that wouldn't require anything to happen in real time: For each non-owner, when the lesson is first pushed to the server, on the server side it randomly creates an order of the choices for each non-owner (this would of course still require keeping track of which choice is correct). Then, when a particular non-owner opens the lesson, they see the same order every time they open the lesson. This would increase the time for the lesson to first process when pushing to the server, and it would increase the amount of server storage, but then nothing else would need to happen in real time when the users open the lesson, except the server would need to serve a different version of the lesson for each non-owner. You'd need to account for how to handle edge cases, like, what if a new user is added to the course after the time the lesson is posted; such cases could be handled, for instance, by launching the default [owner] order for such users. On the other hand that will still require that when a student launches the lesson, the server looks them up by ID and serves them the version meant for them, so if you have 200 or 300 students doing this simultaneously I don't know if the system could handle that.

Alternatives

No response

Additional context

None.