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Do you have students that need extended time or other timing adjustments on assessments? Moodle allows you to override the timing and duration on Quiz and Assignment activities. The article discusses how to do this. It also warns of some serious issues with the group override option.

Warning

Before going any further, you should know about a serious security concern with group extended time overrides in Moodle. As of this writing, there is no good way to hide the names of students in a Moodle group. Thus, if you create a group for all students needing an extended time accommodation, by default students will be able to see who is in that group. There are also some issues with how extended time groups can cause grade book complications.

There are workarounds for these problems (see below), but it is best to avoid group overrides. Individual user overrides do not have these issues.

Quiz and Assignment Overrides

Moodle’s quiz overrides allow a lot of flexibility. You can change the due date, extended the time limit for taking an exam, allow retakes, and more. Group overrides and individual user overrides have the same options. However, for reasons noted in the warning above, IITS suggests using only individual overrides until the security issue is resolved.

Moodle assignment overrides work the same way as quiz overrides and let you change the assignment due dates.

  1. To add an override for one or more students, first set up the quiz with the proper settings for the majority of your students and add questions to the quiz activity.
  2. Once you have configured the quiz and added your questions, open the quiz activity.
  3. From the settings gear in the upper right corner, select user overrides.
  4. Add a separate override for each student that you are giving a different time limit, due date, or other setting exception. In the example below, there are already overrides for two students—one has a later due date, one has a longer time limit, and both have an extra attempt. To add an override for another student, click the button to Add user override.
    illustration showing the option to add a new user override
  5. You can now select the student getting extended time, a new due date, additional attempts, or other exceptions to the quiz defaults. Save or Save and enter another override.
    Illustration of quiz override settings for each student
  6. Create as many individual overrides as needed by repeating steps three to five.