There are serveral ways a quiz attempt can be submitted:
1. The student click the Submit and finish button. In this case,
no problem. We record the current time as the finish time
for the quiz attempt.
2. The student is activly working away at the quiz, and the
count-down timer reachers zero. In this case, we also record
the current time. Note that, if the server is under high load,
then this could well end up being a few seconds after the
theoretical end time, so you could have a quiz with a 30 minute
time limit, with an attempt that lasted 30:07. However, this
is just an accurate reflection of what happened, so should
be recorded like this.
3. If the student is offline when the time expires, then
(depending on the quiz settings) the attempt may be
automatically submitted by cron, but this will happen with
at least some delay (to prevent race conditions between cron
and a student working online) and if cron is running slow
on the server, it could be a lot later. Previously, this led
to, say, a 30 minute quiz where an attempt seemed to have
lasted 67 minutes, which confused people.
Now, in this situation, the finsh time for the quiz attempt is
recorded as the time when the time limit ran out. This is not
just less confusing for teachers looking at the quiz report,
it is also more accurate. That is the latest time at which
students could have made any changes to their responses.
By adding a new optional param to quiz_prepare_and_start_new_attempt()
it can be used by the surrounding code to create an attempt for anybody
else (different from current $USER)
quiz attempt API should let you create an attempt for a different user
The sections are created on the edit quiz page, and then appear in the
navigation panel when the quiz is being attempted to help students find
their way around.
The 'Shuffle questions' setting has been moved from being per-quiz
to being a per-section.
This commit is actually the joint work of Mahmoud Kassaei and Tim Hunt
from The Open University. We could only use one persons name for the
commit and this time Mahmoud gets the credit/blame.