The “Practice mode” which is available in the Intelligence module of WatuPRO sometimes causes a bit of confusion. Let’s clear it all here by outlining some important points.
The purpose of practice mode is to let user train themselves on the matter – not to calculate grade or show them the right answers. Because of this “Practice mode” exams work this way:
Grade and result is not calculated
The user performance is not stored anywhere
Answers to the questions are not shown – it only shows if the answer is correct or not. If you want to display the answer you can use the “optional answer explanation” field. It’s shown even in practice mode.
Questions are always shown one per page
Many settings like payment required, timers, grouping, and so on are disregarded in practice mode.
So if you want all your settings to be taken into account, answers to be revealed and so on, please use “Live mode” exam.
Alternative of Practice Mode
From version 4.9.0.7 WatuPRO supports one option that in many cases will be more suitable for practice. It’s available on the Advanced Settings tab of the Edit Quiz page:
Such quizzes will work exactly as live quizzes except that the results achieved here will not affect reprots, user points balance, stats, anything. And on top of this, the data from such quizzes won’t fill your database which is important for customers with thousands of quiz takers that don’t need to run reports.
This post will address some of the most common questions / support requests we get about emailing results:
Results are not mailed at all
In this case please check:
Have you selected them to be mailed at all
Please have in mind that our plugin only instructs your WordPress installation to send emails. It doesn’t handle the technical side of sending them. So if you have problems sending emails you most likely have to talk to your hosting support or server admin. But here is a super-short guide that will most probably help you resolve your issue:Install WP Mail SMTP or Postman SMTP, set the sender name and email and select “PHP Mail” as sending mode. Try to send a test mail to yourself. If this email is sent properly, please contact us to have a look. If this email is not sent or goes to junk box, the problem is in your installation. You have two options:
Contact your hosting support for help
Switch to SMTP email sending and enter SMTP details. If emails start going out, you are all set – WatuPRO mailing will also work. If even SMTP test email does not get sent you absolutely should talk to your hosting support. Please do not contact us in this case until your mailing issue is resolved.
Note that some email servers may block outgoing emails if the sender email address is different than the SMTP account email. Make sure both are the same and test again.
I don’t see the correct / incorrect checkmarks in the email
You can disable showing correct/incorrect checkmarks from the “Advanced settings” page for the quiz. Please make sure you have not done this.
Don’t forget that survey questions do not have correct / incorrect checkmarks.
Many email client programs by default do not show graphics in emails. For example in Gmail you have to click “Show graphics from xyz@xyz.com” to make the graphics show. From version 5.3.8.5 you can choose to use textual symbols instead of graphical checkmarks on emailed results. You can do this from the WatuPRO Settings page, section Design Theme and Adjustments
Microsoft Outlook 2010 (and maybe other versions) has bug and doesn’t show .png images so it won’t show the correct/incorrect checkmarks. This is a bug in Outlook, not in our software. More info here.
There are “funny” characters in the email
WatuPRO emails are generated and sent in UTF8 which is the modern international format for email. Some old email programs are not configured for UTF8 by default. To reduce the number of users who experience problems with their email clients you’d better avoid pasting text from Word. Its weird apostrophes and dashes will often come as “funny” characters when UTF8 is not supported.
If you are using the quiz in a non-English language that uses special charactes (like German, or entirely non-Latin languages) then having UTF8 enabled client is a must. Most non-English users have that anyway.
For problems that are not listed above or not resolved after following the instructions you are welcome to contact support.
This short visual guide will clarify the common misconceptions about using “category grades” in WatuPRO.
Note: Creating category grades is optional. You can show category performance with points and percent correct answers even without creating category grades. Just skip step 2 and don’t use the grade variables in step 3 (but feel free to use any other variables).
If you prefer watching a video, here’s a 3 minutes video tutorial that shows you the most important things. For full details please still read the documentation on this page.
Here is the procedure step-by-step:
Step 1.Make sure you have question categories.
Category grades make sense only if you have categorized the questions in your test. Typically you will have at least two question categories.
Step 2. Create your grades.
Creating category grades is optional. You can show category performance with points and percent correct answers even without creating category grades.
Go to the Grades page for the exam and select the desired question category you want to create grades for. The page will reload and then you can create and manage the grades for the category.
The category grades look just like the “whole exam” grades. If you use points and not % good answer don’t forget to consider only the possible sum of points within the category, not the total points of the whole exam.
Step 3. Create the category grade output
Under the drop-down selector there is a link “Design the common category grade output for this quiz”. Click on it to open a box like the one shown below:
Note the variables listed below. Some of them are the same as on the “Final screen”, but not all.
On the same page under that box you can control how the categories are ordered and how many of them to show:
This whole design will be repeated once for each category when you use the %%CATGRADES%% variable on the “Final screen”.
On the same section you can select that subcategories will sum up their performance into their parent categories. If this is selected the subcategories will not be included in the %%CATGRADES%% loop variable.
Step 4. Display category grades on the Final screen.
You simply need to include the %%CATGRADES%% variable as shown below:
The variable will be populated with the output you designed in step 2, and it will be repeated once for each question category used in the quiz.
Here is how the output would look like:
Manually Craft The Output
As you see, by default %%CATGRADES%% is automatically replaced by your content in a loop. Sometimes you may want to manually design this output so you can arrange the categories in different way. You can do it this way:
1. Ignore the %%CATGRADES%% variable and the “category grade output” (steps 3 and 4 above).
2. Instead of this use the following variables directly in the “Final page / Quiz output” box:
%%CATEGORY-NAME-X%% %%CATEGORY-DESCRIPTION-X%% %%CATEGORY-CORRECT-X%% (no. correct answers given in the category) %%CATEGORY-WRONG-X%% (no. wrong answers given in the category, from WatuPRO 6.4.5.5) %%CATEGORY-EMPTY-X%% (no. unanswered questions in the category, from WatuPRO 6.4.5.5) %%CATEGORY-TOTAL-X%% (total number of questions answered in the category) %%CATEGORY-POINTS-X%% (points collected in the category) %%CATEGORY-PERCENTAGE-X%% (% correct achieved) %%CATEGORY-GTITLE-X%% (grade title of the assigned grade, if any) %%CATEGORY-GDESCRIPTION-X%% (grade description, if any) %%CATEGORY-PERCENTAGEOFMAX-X%% (% from maximum points in that category collected, variable available from WatuPRO v. 5.0.8.1) %%CATEGORY-ANSWERS-X%% (the %%ANSWERS%% variable only for this category, added in WatuPRO 6.6.9) %%CATEGORY-UNRESOLVED-X%% (the %%UNRESOLVED%% variable only for this category, added in WatuPRO 6.6.9)
Note that X is the Category ID. You can see all category IDs at the “Question categories” page.
From WatuPRO version 5.8.4.5 the variables that you see in bold can also be used directly in certificates. The variables that are NOT bold will work only if you have explicitly selected the option “Store full category grades along with the results” at the Edit Quiz -> Advanced Settings tab, section “Advanced Workflow Settings”. Note that this selection can result in large database space usage.
Creating Charts
If you have the Reporting Module installed you can create a chart like this:
Simply embed the shortcode watupror-user-cat-chart. It accepts some parameters explained in the internal Help page of the plugin.
Since version 6.2.2.5 the plugin with the Reporting module can also generate two pie charts:
The points based pie chart shows the points collected per question category:
The shortcode to display the above chart is [watupror-pie-chart radius=150 from="points"]. The “radius” parameter is optional and defaults to 100 (pixels).
The same shortcode but used with attribute from=”correct” will display one pie for each question category, showing percent correct vs. percent wrong answers:
When from=”correct” you can also pass draw_unanswered=1 to generate charts with 3 sectors – for correctly answered, wrongly answered, and unanswered questions. Example:
(the above parameter is available from WatuPRO 6.4.6)
You can learn about all available charts in the Reporting module here.
Pie Charts in Email and PDF
Note that the pie charts shown above are JavaScript based and won’t be displayed in email sent to user neither in PDF output. There is a solution for this: if your server has the GD library installed (most web hosts have it), you can use the GD version which produces real images.
To use this mode you need to pass attribute mode=”gd” to the shortcode, for example like this:
Using this feature with manually crafting the output is also a way to create Myers-Briggs personality tests. Here’s how to do it:
Place your questions in five categories (for example Mind, Energy, Nature, Tactics, Identity)
Create different category grades for each category. For mind you can have grades Extraverted and Introverted (use only the letters for grade title: E and I), for Energy Intuitive and Observant etc.
In the final screen construct the 5 letter personality types by combining the grade titles of the 5 categories: %%CATEGORY-GTITLE-1%%%%CATEGORY-GTITLE-2%%%%CATEGORY-GTITLE-3%%%%CATEGORY-GTITLE-4%%-%%CATEGORY-GTITLE-5%%
Then if you wish you can construct the explanation text from the descriptions of all category grades similar to how you constructed the title above
Test Grade Based on Question Category Performance
From 5.5.8 you can define final test grade which depends on the performance of each question category. This is the best way to handle complicated and non-standard tests. Learn more about this feature here.
Troubleshooting
Problem: Not all categories appear on the final screen.
Solution: This happens because you have added questions from categories whose order is not yet defined.Simply re-save the quiz and everything will be fine. If you want to change the category order you can do it from the Advanced Settings tab of the quiz.
Such quizzes will work exactly as live quizzes except that the results achieved here will not affect reprots, user points balance, stats, anything. And on top of this, the data from such quizzes won’t fill your database which is important for customers with thousands of quiz takers that don’t need to run reports.
