Allow the same question multiple times in an assessment

[trombonekenny]

PL currently doesn't have a way to use the same question multiple times in a single assessment.

Investigate to see if it's possible to allow this and turn the blocking error into a warning.

[mwest1066]

The fundamental problem is that we need some way to know which assessment question corresponds to each question in infoAssessment.json. At the moment we use the QID to do this, which is why each QID can only appear once per assessment. If we want to allow repeated QIDs then we'd need to add some other unique identifier. We could use the pair (QID, index), where index is 0 for the first occurrence of the QID in the assessment, 1 for the second, etc. This would mean that the repeated-QID questions couldn't be reordered in the assessment, but that might not be too much of a limitation in practice. To allow reordering we'd need to add an (optional?) unique key to each question in the JSON file.

That being said, I haven't yet seen a convincing use case for allowing repeated QIDs in an assessment.

[jonatanschroeder]

Instead of repeating it, it probably makes sense to add an option like "numInstances" or something like that.

[eliotwrobson]

Instead of repeating it, it probably makes sense to add an option like "numInstances" or something like that.

Agree here. If questions perform identically, then it's additionally annoying to make the instructor duplicate the QID in the
same file.

That being said, I haven't yet seen a convincing use case for allowing repeated QIDs in an assessment.

This could be quite useful if something like this feature ever makes it in: #3848
For the current feature set, agree that it's probably overkill.

[mwest1066]

Instead of repeating it, it probably makes sense to add an option like "numInstances" or something like that.

I guess I still don't understand the use case here. Do you have any examples of when this would be used?

[mwest1066]

This could be quite useful if something like this feature ever makes it in: #3848 For the current feature set, agree that it's probably overkill.

Great point! I agree that together with #3848 this would be very useful.

[jonatanschroeder]

I guess I still don't understand the use case here. Do you have any examples of when this would be used?

I have seen cases in the past of instructors that wanted to test, in an exam environment, the same question multiple times with different variants. The idea is to assess that the student is competent in solving a problem in more than one variant.