Here's an interesting scenario: You create a Captivate project that contains 12 slides: 10 question slides, each worth 10 points (that's 100 points total), and two non-question slides that contain some text, images, and simple image buttons used for navigation.
Soon after you roll out your course, learners report a big problem with the way the quiz is scoring. Several people answer every quiz question correctly but instead of receiving the expected perfect score of 100, they get a 96. Say what?
How about this one? You have a 5-question quiz in the project. As with the first example, the project also has a couple of non-quiz slides containing simple "go to the next slide" buttons... maybe even some click boxes. During the testing phase, the progress indicator is off... learners are told that they are on question 1 of 6 when there are only 5 questions
Both problems mentioned above are more common than you might think. The issues aren't with the question slides and they're not a problem with your learners. The problem is typically found with the interactive objects on the non-question slides.
If you were to select a click box or button and observe the Reporting area on the Properties Inspector, you'd see that any interactive object (click boxes, buttons, text entry boxes, etc.) can report interactivity. In essence, any interactive object can be treated like it's a question in a quiz.
In the example below, I've selected a regular button and, on the Properties Inspector, Actions tab, I've told Captivate to treat the button like a quiz question by simply selecting "Include in Quiz." I've also assigned a point value (in this instance, 100 points) and told Captivate to not only count the points as part of the quiz (Add to Total), but to Report Answers to my Learning Management System (Report Answers).
The Include in Quiz, Add to Total, and Report Answers options are awesome if you want to create non-traditional quiz questions. However, the options can also cause the troubles I mentioned at the beginning of this article. When I'm working with interactive objects, I am always on my guard to ensure that none of the Reporting options are enabled (unless doing so is intentional). Between the three options, I find the Add to Total and Report Answers options to be the root cause of the miss-scoring issues.
Disabling the Reporting options is a simple matter of clearing a few check boxes. But what if you have a large project (perhaps 100 slides or more)? While some of the slides are question slides that you might want to score... and perhaps there are buttons or click boxes that you also want to include in the quiz... the majority of the slide objects aren't supposed to report a score. It's going to be a real pain to open each of the slides, show the Properties of each object and ensure the Reporting options are disabled. What's a developer to do? Read on...
Choose Project > Advanced Interaction to open the Advanced Interaction window. In the image below, you can see that I have objects in my project that are reporting scores (12 points in fact). I wouldn't have known that if not for the Advanced Interaction window. And if I was expecting to have objects report a total value of 100 points, I can see now that I've got a problem.
Perhaps I don't want anything to score at all. All that I would need to do is select the objects in the Advanced Interaction window and then, on the Properties Inspector, deselect Add to Total.
Over the years I have found the Advanced Interaction window to be a huge time- and frustration-saver. If you've found a particular area in Captivate that saves you time, please feel free to share.
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