Yacapaca

A pre-test serves two functions, to provide a baseline from which to demonstrate progression, and as a planning tool to help you focus on the most-needed areas. We have just launched a really significant improvement on this latter function, that has the potential to make a real difference to the efficiency of your (and your colleagues’) teaching.

Click on any quiz that has results in your Assignments List, and you get a very neat analysis of what your students do and don’t know, like this…

The questions are grouped by up to 6 categories, and presented in a simple bar chart.

Sometimes, though, it looks more like this…

Python twice, ICT (well, duh!), computing and programming, of each of which Python is a subset anyway. Each of these tags is useful and relevant in some context – for example other quizzes that use some of the same questions – but they are positively chocolate teapot here. The algorithm that selects which tags to show is not working as efficiently as we would like.

How we solved the problem

Now, if you are the quiz author, there is a simple solution. From your My Quizzes page, click Edit for any quiz. This takes you to the combined edit/analysis page, where you can see complete stats for the quiz, either per-question or grouped by tag. At the top, there is a new button “Manage Analytics”.

This opens a popup with a list of all the available tags.

Select up to 6 tags, and your selection will now override the algorithm. It’s ever so easy to use, and it instantly increases the effectiveness of the quiz as a lesson planning/replanning tool. Try it now! You can probably get all your most popular quizzes converted to better analytics in the next 30 minutes.