Quiz 2.3: Smarter Scoring and Image Support

Version 2.3 of PressPrimer Quiz is now available on WordPress.org! It’s a big update to the free plugin and it’s mostly made up of features requested by PressPrimer users. The headline features include a new scoring system and image support in questions, but there’s a lot more packed in the release.

Here’s what’s new.

New Multiple-Answer Scoring Modes

Multiple-answer questions (which have checkbox answers where more than one answer might be correct) are deceptively hard to score. If a question has five possible answers and three are correct, how should you score someone who picks two correct answers and one incorrect choice? Different businesses and organizations answer the question in different ways, and until now, PressPrimer Quiz only offered a single solution.

Version 2.3 adds these four scoring modes:

1. Right Minus Wrong (the new default) represents the previous behavior in PressPrimer Quiz, where incorrect selections are subtracted from correct ones. So if there were three correct answers and a user chose two correct and one incorrect for a question with 1 point, they would score 0.33.
2. Partial Credit gives credit for each correct answer selected; wrong selections are ignored.
3. Partial Credit, No Wrong Answers gives credit for each correct answer selected, but if the student chooses any wrong answers, they automatically score zero for the question.
4. All or Nothing either gives full credit (when a user chooses all correct answers and no incorrect ones) or none at all (if the user chooses any incorrect answers or misses any correct ones).

It can be a bit confusing without examples, so make sure to check out our Knowledge Base article about scoring modes so you pick the right one for your context. There’s a new site-wide setting for the default mode under PressPrimer Quiz > Settings > General, but of course the mode can be overridden at the quiz level.

Image Support in Questions

New in version 2.3 is support for inserting images directly into questions and answers. We kept media use simple, so images are always centered, there’s automatic lightbox support, and images are resized to fit the size that’s available. Adding an image is easy; you’ll see a new image icon in the editor that allows you to drag-and-drop media right into the question editor.

On the front end, users will see a resized image with an icon to click to see a larger copy. The uploader is fully private, meaning quiz images aren’t exposed in your regular Media Library and teachers won’t see what anyone else has uploaded.

It’s worth noting that we have extended image support to the premium plugins. The import/export system in the Educator add-on preserves images when moving between sites (use JSON exports for this, and of course export file sizes will be significantly larger). Reports and AI distractor generation also now recognize when questions and answers contain images and will behave accordingly. For reports, CSV exports, and admin-facing locations where showing images wouldn’t be suitable, we show an “[image]” placeholder instead.

Maximum Answers Per Question

An interesting request we had a few weeks ago was to support a way for questions to have up to eight possible answers, but to only expose a subset of that to students. In other words, maybe for a particular quiz, students should only see up to five possible answers for each quiz question, drawn randomly from a pool of eight. (Correct answers would also be shown, of course; only distractors would be pulled randomly.) This new setting on the quiz settings page allows a quiz to be set up with a maximum number of answers per question:

Scoring is fully aware of the maximum answer behavior. In other words, students are never penalized for distractors they didn’t see, scoring accounts for how many answers are shown, and students are only shown the answers they saw during the quiz on the quiz results page.

Per-Quiz Display Defaults

Our quiz block and shortcode offer all kinds of attributes for customizing what’s shown to students on the start and result pages, but there was a gap with output when quizzes were linked to lessons and topics in LMS settings. When you mapped associations inside the LMS, those attributes weren’t available. In the new 2.3 release, all display options are added to the bottom of the quiz edit page. Using those settings allows control over how quizzes are shown to students when block and shortcode overrides aren’t available or aren’t used.

A Cleaner Quiz Editor

With all of the new options available for quizzes, the editor settings became too long to be easily manageable. To help with that, there’s a new sticky Table of Contents section on the right side of the page that will help you move between sections. We’ve also done some cleanup to field sizes and labels to improve consistency.

Premium and Other Updates

There are no major new features in the 2.3 updates for the School, Educator, and Enterprise add-ons, but a lot happened behind the scenes to support the new core plugin features.

In Educator, the import/export feature preserves images and tracks image ownership so cleanup doesn’t delete images that questions still use. In School, reports are aware of the scoring mode and answer subsets, and xAPI statements add support for reporting on which answers students received. In Enterprise, the audit log captures changes to new features.

You may also notice a new Upgrade page with more information about the premium add-ons (unless Enterprise is active, in which case no upgrades would be available).

Updating

If you’re already using PressPrimer Quiz, you can update safely through your WordPress dashboard. Existing quizzes will default to the Right Minus Wrong scoring mode, and other new features won’t change existing questions unless you configure them.

Thanks for using PressPrimer Quiz! As always, we’d love to hear how the new features are working for you; let us know in the comments below.