Why?

More than 7 years ago I wrote a post ‘Quiz and Frustration‘.  It was about a use case,  asked for by a forum user, how to stop an assessment when the learner could never succeed because he lost already too much points. It feels like being kind to the learner, avoiding frustrations. Recently a similar question appeared, this time about a Pretest. Pretest slides as designed since many versions in Captivate, are also frustrating because of their limitations. You need to have all the Pretest slides in sequence at the start of the course, all navigation will be disabled, almost all commands for On Enter events are greyed out. In short: there is almost no possibility to tweak Pretest slides, reason why I don’t remember having used them ever.

In Flanders there is a sayiung ‘Twee vliegen in één klap’ (killing two flies at once). Let me show a workaround for a Pretest (without the normal limitations) and update  that old post, taking advantage of improvements since …. version 6.

Example file

Explore this published file:

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The course starts with a Pretest (7 questions). Based on the obtained scores, 3 situations are possible:

• Learner gets a passing score on the Pretest. In that case he will see the score slide.
• Learner answers some questions, but due to the low score, will not be able to finish the pretest with succes even if all remaining questions are answered correctly. In that case the remaining questions will be skipped and the learner will have to view content slides.
• Learner finishes pretest but at the end didn’t get a passing score, same situation as in the second one: learner will have to view content slides.

I didn’t add content slides, just a symbolic one. It is possible that other actions are wanted at the end, but focus of this example is only on the workflow to have questions skipped (second situation).

Setup of the file will be explained in a blog post.  I didn’t use Pretest slide but normal question slides, because several advanced actions need to be triggered.