Shuffling the answers

Any question with options can show them in a different order for each learner. It is a checkbox on the question, set per question rather than per course.

Turning it on

Edit the question in the lesson editor and tick the shuffle setting. It applies from the next time anybody opens the lesson.

What stays fixed

The marking. Grapevine records which option is correct by its place in your list, and shuffles only what is drawn on screen — so the right answer stays the right answer however it is ordered, and answers already given are unaffected.

Turning shuffling on or off on a question people have already answered does not disturb their marks.

What it does and does not do

It does stop the shape of an answer being passed along. “It’s the third one” stops being useful.

It does not stop anybody sharing the answer itself. Somebody who says “the answer is Antioch” has defeated it entirely. Shuffling raises the effort a little; it is not an integrity measure, and a course where that matters needs a different answer — different questions, or a person in the room.

When not to use it

Do not shuffle when the order carries meaning:

• Options that are a scale — always / often / sometimes / never — are much harder to read out of order.
• Options that build on each other, where reading them in sequence is part of the question.
• Anything with a “none of the above” or “all of the above”, which has to be last to make sense.

For the other types: put these in order always presents its items shuffled, since showing them already in order would give the answer away. Matching pairs shuffles the side being matched to, never both at once — shuffling both makes the question no harder and the screen harder to read.