Thursday, March 25, 2010

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

12 comments:

  1. Looks as though most people will continue working until midnight; then decide that it would be a better idea to start again in the morning.

    This is not how I lived as a young undergrad/postgrad. This smacks of mature, sensible behaviour.

    ReplyDelete
  2. the day before perhaps because so many of them don't even know what day it is

    ReplyDelete
  3. Small correction. The deadlines for iCMAs (quizzes) is still midnight, not noon. It was only assignments that changed, at the moment.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have just crunched the numbers on our face-to-face biology course at Imperial.

    Our students show a very different pattern, with very few pieces of work handed in early.

    See http://msars.posterous.com/online-submissions-in-a-face-to-face-course

    ReplyDelete
  5. thanks for posting these db queries Tim - great for us sql-dummies who have just enough savvy to use your Custom SQL query admin report :)

    When I ran the 2 queries over our development server, and added up the submissions generated by each, I get 3,000 for the "hours before deadline" data set but 20,000 for "by hour of the day" set. Am I missing something obvious? Why aren't these totals the same?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hours before deadline can only include quizzes with a close date. The by hour of day query includes all quizzes.

    ReplyDelete
  7. That notch at dinner time is striking. I've never before seen something like that in all the otherwise-familiar daily utilization curves I've ever seen for network bandwidths, etc.

    Open University students must take suppertime very seriously. How interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The University of Canberra's hourly submission pattern is very similar to the OU's except that we have a 2nd noticeable dip between midday and 1pm, with our biggest peak at 11am to midday. Our students obviously take lunch time seriously too :-)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Tim, any chance you could share with us the corresponding scripts for assignment submissions?

    ReplyDelete
  10. I'm wondering if the day of the week might make a difference too? Are they usually Monday? I think all of my TMA deadlines have been, but don't know about iCMAs. If so then, it's probably not that surprising if lots of people submit during the previous weekend.

    There's also the question of how much margin you leave for technical issues when submitting. I certainly left a bigger margin for the one iCMA that I've done than for the TMAs.

    ReplyDelete
  11. James, is it dinner, or commuting time? It is a bit striking to me how many OU students (most of whom are studying part time) submit during the working day.

    Alan, Shall we move discussion of database queries to an appropriate Moodle.org forum?

    Juliette, I had a look at when the deadlines were. They seem reasonably evenly distributed (Sun 18, Mon 28, Tue, 9 Wed 20, Thu 49, Fri 49, Sat, 19.
    ). So, the peak, if anything, is Thursday and Friday.

    ReplyDelete
  12. database queries discussion moved to http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=136484

    ReplyDelete