Random Quiz Maker Addon

Instead of displaying a set sequence of (say 10) questions one after the other in a quiz you might prefer to set up a larger number of questions (say 50) and have the questions to be displayed selected at random from that larger group.

Rather than set up a new quiz maker script to create a single quiz script like that I decided instead to work out code that could be added to several of my quiz makers to add the functionality to the existing quiz makers.

The actual quiz questions selected for inclusion in the quiz will be randomly chosen at the start of the quiz. Information about which entries have been chosen will then be stored in a session cookie so that the selected questions can be displayed in order as the person proceeds through the quiz. If your visitor attempts the quiz a second time during the same browser session then the same questions will be displayed. Session cookies are retained only until the person closes their browser so they will almost certainly get a different random selection of quiz questions on their next visit.

If your visitor does not have first party session cookies enabled then each question will be randomly selected from all possible questions in the quiz and it will be possible for the same question to appear more than once during the same quiz.

The following code can be added to the end of the head script code of any of the quiz scripts where the quiz questions are all displayed by the one page (ie. any of my quiz makers except Quiz Maker 2). The only change that you need to make to the code is to substitute the number of questions you want to include in the randomly generated quiz into the quest variable at the top of the script.

var quest = 5; // Random Quiz Selector Addon // copyright 12th April, 2005 by Stephen Chapman // these functions may be added to the bottom of the quizhead.js script // of most of my quiz scripts to randomly select "quest" questions from // a larger array of questions // permission to use this Javascript on your web page is granted // provided that all of the code in this script (including these // comments) is used without any alteration function randQuiz(num,arry) {if (quiz.length < num) return arry;var rndary = new Array();for (var i = 0; i<arry.length; i++) {var x = Math.floor(Math.random()*500)+100;var y = 101+i;rndary[i] = ''+x+y+':'+arry[i];}rndary.sort();var newary = new Array();var sel = '';for (var i=0; i<num; i++) {sel += rndary[i].substr(3,3); newary[i] = rndary[i].substr(7);}document.cookie = 'quizSel='+sel;return newary;} function sameQuiz(quiz,sel) {var newary = new Array();for (var i=0; i< sel.length/3;i++) {var n = sel.substr(i*3,3);var m = parseInt(n) - 101;newary[i] = quiz[m];}return newary;} function readCookie(cname) {thisCookie = document.cookie.split('; ');for (var i=0; i<thisCookie.length;i++) {if (thisCookie[i].split('=')[0] == cname) return thisCookie[i].split('=')[1];} return false;} var sel = readCookie('quizSel');if (sel) quiz = sameQuiz(quiz,sel);else quiz = randQuiz(quest,quiz);

Provided that your quiz array contains at least the specified number of questions then that number of questions will be randomly selected when someone decides to start the quiz. If there are fewer questions then those questions will display in the order entered rather than in a random order.