[LON-CAPA-users] Checking status of a part that has timed out

[Mills, Douglas G]

Hey All,

Good seeing those of you who were at the conference last week!  Some of us from Illinois were asking about setting up a sequence so that three timed quizzes (each of which consists of a single multipart problem) could be taken in succession, each succeeding quiz becoming available only once the previous one had been attempted. I have this working now (thank you Ray for your very valuable guidance!) EXCEPT in the case where a student starts a quiz, gets distracted, and never submits a part and it times out.  Starting but never submitting an answer does not show up as a “try” -- using the otherwise successful condition:

&EXT('user.resource.resource.0.tries','q2') >0

For a couple of minutes I had hoped that maybe &check_status() might work if I looked for a status that was unequal to “undef”; however, I realized that’s not an &EXT function so I’m guessing does not check beyond the present resource. This seems to be confirmed in the email exchange in the logs here:

http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-users/2008-May/003139.html

It was suggested there that an equivalent of &check_status be made part of the &ext functions, but apparently that maybe has not yet happened.

I think I can come up with a work-around from another direction, but thought I might as well ask on the list — is anyone aware of a way to check that a timed problem has been started even if no submissions on the problem have been made?  Thanks!

Doug

Douglas Mills
Director of Instructional Technologies
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois
dmills@illinois.edu
(217) 244-5739