Captivate and SumTotal: 4. Allowing multiple attempts on a captivate quiz

Note: See also Captivate Quizzes marking “Failed” when quiz is not yet completed for more on how to control Captivate’s scoring and completion in an LMS.


Allowing multiple attempts on a quiz requires several items be set up correctly:

  • Make sure that allow Backward movement is allowed in the quiz manager.
    (but do NOT allow it to add “Back” buttons – it will ask you about this when you select “Backward Movement.”
  • Make sure that “If Failing Grade” in Quiz Manager is set to 2 or more attempts.

    Note: Limiting the attempts on a quiz forces the user to close the window and use the Enter the lesson button which I find sort of arbitrary and punitive for no real gain, since they can always get around the specified number of attempts by closing the quiz and clicking Enter the Lesson again.

    Limiting the ability to go back and use the Enter the Lesson button would require an enhancement to MLearning.

  • Both “If Passing Grade” and “If Failing Grade” should be set to Jump to next slide (see test1 in the attached files), unless you are using separate pass and fail slides, in which case they should jump to the appropriate slides. See test2 and test3 for example.

    The slide that you are jumping to should be a sort of path-splitting slide that allows you to choose either “close window”, “try again” or “continue on to next section”

    None of these buttons’ reporting tab should be set to include in quiz.

    Alternatively, you could split the choices up into separate “pass” and “fail” slides, with Close Window and Try again on the Fail slide, and Close Window and Continue on to next section on the Pass slide.

    The “Close window” button executes “parent.window.close()” and closes the window, at least in IE. Other browsers may give permissions errors.

    The “Try again” button will send you back to the first slide of the SCO, until you hit the maximum number of attempts. Then it stops functioning entirely, which is not very graceful from a usability standpoint.

    The “Continue on to next section” button continues on to the next SCO.

    If you want separate pass and fail slides, see “test2” as an example in the downloaded files.

  • Re-scoring may fail sometimes. I have been able to get it to fail to rescore occasionally but usually it does rescore upon retrying the quiz. And it will always rescore upon hitting the “Enter the lesson” button and re-trying the SCO that way if the retry within captivate fails.