Configuring exam navigation • examinr

Exams are a collection of sections and you can configure how learners will move through these sections via options set in the YAML front-matter of the exam document. There are two types of navigation available:

progressive: learners have access to one section at a time and they can only move forward,
all-at-once: learners have access to all sections at once.

The following configuration options are relevant for section navigation:

Option	Description
`progressive`	Should the exam be progressive (`TRUE`) or all-at-once (`FALSE`).
`order`	If the exam is progressive, should the order of the sections be randomized?

The relevant part of the YAML front-matter to set these settings is:

output:
  examinr::exam_document:
    progressive: yes
    order: random

Sections

A section in an exam document starts with a level-one heading, i.e., lines starting with a single hash #. The following R markdown document, for example has four sections: Introduction, Confidence Intervals, MLE, and Done!.

# Introduction

...

# Confidence Intervals

...

# MLE

...

# Done!

...

Anything between # Introduction and # Confidence Intervals is considered the content of section Introduction.

The “end” section

Unless the exam is configured to show feedback immediately after the exam is submitted (i.e., feedback="immediately"), the last section, Done!, is treated differently from the rest. It is considered the “end” section, and you should use this section to let learners know they have finished the exam.

The “end” section is a dead end and hence does not have a submit button at the bottom. It is always displayed last, even if the exam is configured to randomized the section order.

Therefore, unless feedback="immediately", an exam document must have at least two sections: at least one section with actual content and the “end” section.

Progressive exams

In progressive exams, only a single section is displayed at any given time. To move on to the next section, learners must click the submit button at the bottom of the section. This will save all their answers and the next section will be displayed. The exam is considered finished when the last section is submitted (not counting the “end” section).

You can randomize the order in which a learner moves through the sections by setting the option order="random". The “end” section will always be displayed last.

Section-specific configuration

You can overwrite some settings for individual sections with section_config() in a R code chunk with server-start context. You can change the label of the submit button, or fix the order of the section.

In the above example, you may want to have the section Introduction always in its original position (i.e., first) and use a different button label, e.g.,

#! context="server-start"
section_config("Introduction", fix_order = TRUE, button_label = "Start exam")

All-at-once exams

For all-at-once exams, the section order cannot be randomized and is always as given in the exam document. Only the last section (not including the “end” section) will have a submit button. This submit button will submit answers to all questions across all sections and will mark the exam as finished.