Picking the same randomized question twice

May 01, 2013

I've created a quiz where i have a number of questions (say 8) and I tell the question bank to only randomly pick 5 of them. It will pick the same question every now and then twice. It's not doing it every time. Any ideas?

3 Replies
Christine Hendrickson

Hi Michelle,

If you set your questions to randomly pull from a question bank, there's no way to make sure that you won't see a particular question more than once. 

If you have a small group of questions, similar to what you're using, and pulling more than half, you're more likely to see the same questions come up again on additional attempts. 

The more questions you pull from, the less likely you'll see this happen. 

Say, for example, you have a 20 question bank. If you pull 12 from that bank, you'll have more repeat questions show up. However, if you only pulled 5 from that bank, you probably wouldn't see questions from a previous attempt. 

I hope this makes sense :) Let me know if you have any questions.

Christine

Michelle Susar

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So you’re saying that if I have 20 questions in a 20 questionbank, I will always get duplicate questions? I’m just trying to advise myclient on the best option. I’m thinking of telling my client to lower theiroverall bank from 35 questions down to 20, since 20 is the total number theywant to have the learner see. Will that remove the repeat risk?

Christine Hendrickson

Good morning Michelle,

If you lower the amount of questions in your question bank, you increase the risk of questions repeating. The number you'll want to lower is the number of questions that you pull randomly from the bank. Or, increase the amount of questions you're pulling from (the amount of questions in the bank itself).

So, if you have 35 questions in your question bank and you pull 20, that's quite a bit over half of those questions you'd pull each time, so you'd probably see a bit of repeat questions. Now, if you were to pull 15 randomly, you're less likely to see questions repeat. If you pulled 10, even less. 

If you decide to drop your question bank from 35 to 20 questions, it would really depend on how many questions you want to randomly display to the user each time.

I hope this helps :) If you have any other questions, just let me know!

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