When do students submit their online tests?

I am currently studying an Open University course (M888 Databases in Enterprise systems. There was an assignment due today, and like many students, I submitted only an hour before the deadline.

That got me thinking, are all students really like that? Well, I don't have access to our assessment submission system, but I do work on our Moodle-based VLE, so I can give you the data from there.

This graph shows how many hours before the deadline students submit their Moodle quizzes (iCMAs in OU-speak)



That is not exactly what I was expecting. Certainly, there is a bit of a peak in the last few hours, but there is another peak almost exactly 24 hours before that, with lesser peaks two and three days before.

Note that all our deadlines are at noon (it used to be midnight, but that changed a few months ago). The graph above is consistent with our general pattern of usage. The following graph shows what time of day students submitted their quiz attempts. It is same shape as our general load graph for most OU online systems.



I don't know what, if anything, this means, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.

By the way, if you want to compute these graphs for your own Moodle, here are the database queries I used:

-- Number of quiz submissions by hour before deadline
SELECT 
    (quiz.timeclose - qa.timefinish) / 3600 AS hoursbefore,
    COUNT(1)

FROM mdl_quiz_attempts qa
JOIN mdl_quiz quiz ON quiz.id = qa.quiz

WHERE
    qa.preview = 0 AND
    quiz.timeclose <> 0 AND
    qa.timefinish <> 0

GROUP BY
    (quiz.timeclose - qa.timefinish) / 3600

HAVING (quiz.timeclose - qa.timefinish) / 3600 < 24 * 7

ORDER BY
    hoursbefore

-- Number of quiz submissions by hour of day
SELECT 
    DATE_PART('hour', TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE 'epoch' + timefinish * INTERVAL '1 second') AS hour,
    COUNT(1)

FROM mdl_quiz_attempts qa

WHERE
    qa.preview = 0 AND
    qa.timefinish <> 0

GROUP BY
    DATE_PART('hour', TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE 'epoch' + timefinish * INTERVAL '1 second')

ORDER BY
    hour