To let one student retake a quiz in WordPress with Learnomy, open their profile in the admin, find the quiz under Quiz attempt limits, and click Grant 1 attempt. That adds one attempt for that student on that quiz and nothing else. The quiz’s cap stays the same for everyone else, and the student’s lessons and earlier results stay where they are.
It’s the smallest of three ways to unblock someone, and usually the right one. The other two work too, but they cost more than the problem deserves. Here’s what each does.
Why a capped quiz turns into a support ticket
A cap is a good idea. Without one, a graded quiz becomes trial and error. But caps fail in predictable ways: the browser crashed on the last question, the power went out, the student’s connection dropped while the timer was running, or you set the limit too low and only noticed after the first cohort hit it.
The student’s email is always short. “It says I have no attempts left.” What you do next depends on how much you’re willing to break to fix it.
Three ways to unblock a student
Raise the quiz’s attempt limit. Every quiz has its own attempt limit, and 0 means unlimited. Change it and it applies to everyone taking that quiz, which is right if the cap was a mistake and wrong if it was one person’s bad afternoon. You’ve quietly given every other student more tries at a graded quiz.
Grant the one student an extra attempt. This is the per-student route. You add attempts to one student’s allowance for one quiz. Their attempts so far stay on record, nothing is deleted, and no other quiz is touched.
Reset the course. The profile’s Reset progress action clears the student’s lesson completions and their quiz attempts for that course. The enrollment stays active and the student starts again from the beginning. It does unblock the quiz, but only by deleting everything around it.
That last point is the one worth sitting with. If a student has finished fifteen lessons and got stuck on the final quiz, a reset gives them the quiz back and takes the fifteen lessons away.
Granting one extra attempt from the student profile
Open the student in the admin and scroll below their attempts table. The Quiz attempt limits card lists one row per quiz they’ve attempted that has a cap. Quizzes with unlimited attempts don’t appear, because there’s nothing to grant.
Each row shows the cap that applies to this student, meaning the quiz’s own limit plus anything already granted, next to how many attempts they’ve used. That’s the number you want in front of you before deciding.
Then there are two buttons:
- Grant 1 attempt adds one.
- Take back 1 attempt removes one, if you gave it by mistake.
Grants accumulate, so clicking twice gives two. The student’s own quiz screen picks up the new total straight away: the start gate, the results screen and the Try Again button all read the same figure.
Every grant is also written to the audit log as an attempts.grant entry with the student, the quiz and the amount, so you can tell later who gave out what. Developers get an action hook too, learnomy_quiz_attempts_granted, if they want to send a notification when it happens.
What an instructor can do
You don’t have to be an administrator. An instructor sees Grant 1 attempt on the rows for quizzes in courses they can grade, which is the same permission that lets them open the grading inbox for those quizzes. On any other row they see a dash, so the table still lines up.
That’s the whole instructor toolkit here. Resetting progress stays with administrators, which is a reasonable split: handing someone one more go is a judgement call a teacher should make, while wiping a course’s progress is the kind of thing you want fewer people able to do. The student management docs have the full list of what instructors can and can’t touch.
What stays untouched
Because a grant only changes the allowance, the rest of the record is left alone. Earlier attempts stay on the student’s profile. Lesson completions don’t move. How the final score is picked still follows the quiz’s grading method, which you set to Highest, First, Latest or Average, so decide that before you start handing out extra attempts. If it’s set to Latest, a bad retake replaces a good earlier one.
A worked example
Say a quiz allows two attempts. Maya uses both, and the second one dies halfway through when her laptop restarts. Her profile row reads two used out of two allowed.
You click Grant 1 attempt. The row now reads two used out of three, and Maya’s quiz screen shows one attempt remaining. Everyone else’s cap still says two. If she passes on the third go, you’re done.
Compare that with the reset. Maya would have two attempts again, sure, but she’d also have to click through every lesson she’d already finished, and she’d be right to ask why.
Setting a cap you won’t have to override
The cap is a policy, so write it down before the first cohort starts. When a student asks for another go, you want the answer to come from a rule you already chose, not from whoever happened to read the email first.
Most of these tickets are avoidable. A few habits help:
- Give a quiz more than one attempt unless it’s genuinely high-stakes. A cap of one turns every glitch into a ticket.
- Use Practice mode for self-checks. Practice quizzes are unlimited and never block course completion, so there’s no cap to unblock. The quiz modes docs explain the three modes.
- Keep Reset progress for the case it was made for, a student who wants to start the whole course again.
Developers who need caps by cohort or by plan can hook the learnomy_quiz_max_attempts filter, which runs after a student’s grants are added.
The full set of quiz settings is in Building a Quiz, and there’s an overview of what quizzes can do on the quizzes page. Learnomy Free has the per-student grant, so you can use it without upgrading; see Free vs Pro for what else sits on each side.