Access and enrollment - Plugixa Exam

Every exam answers one question before anything else happens: is this person allowed to start? Four ways of answering it ship free, and Pro adds a fifth.

Every limit here is enforced on the server. Nothing depends on a button being hidden.

The access modes

Mode	Who gets in	Needs an account
Open	Anybody who can reach the page	No
By role	Signed-in users whose role you nominate	Yes
Access code	Anybody holding the code	No
Guest	Anybody, after giving a name and an email	No
Restricted PRO	Members of a cohort	Yes

Open

The exam is public. Good for practice papers, public self-assessment and pre-course diagnostics.

By role

Restrict to signed-in users and nominate the role that qualifies. This is the mode to use when the site already knows who its learners are.

Access code

One code, shared with a room. No accounts to create and no invitations to send, which makes it the practical choice for a class sitting an exam together.

The code is checked server-side at the gate. Sharing it further is a social problem, not a technical one: pair it with an opening window and an attempt cap if that matters.

Guest

The candidate gives a name and an email and starts. They are identified by a signed cookie, not a PHP session, and the cookie is set when they press Start, never for merely looking at an exam.

Why not a PHP session? A session cookie on every visitor breaks page caching for the whole site. The signed cookie is set only for somebody who has actually begun a paper, so a first-time visitor’s pages stay cacheable.

Attempts by guests are still attributed, still marked and still appear in results.

Restricted PRO

Access is answered by the Cohorts module: hand-picked lists of people, for exams that belong to a class rather than to a site. See Cohorts.

Without that module installed, Restricted denies everyone except administrators. That is deliberate. An exam whose restriction list cannot be read must not quietly become an open exam.

Windows

Setting	What it does
Open from	Nobody may start before this time
Open until	Nobody may start after this time
Window close action	What happens to attempts still running when the window shuts: close them, or let them run out their own clock

run out is the humane setting for an exam with a generous window and a short time limit: somebody who started five minutes before closing still gets their full time.

Attempt caps and cooldowns

Setting	What it does
Max attempts	How many sittings one person gets. 0 is unlimited
Cooldown minutes	How long they must wait between sittings

The cap counts attempts still in progress. An abandoned paper is holding one of that candidate’s allowed attempts until something closes it, which is exactly why the inactivity sweep exists. If somebody reports being locked out of a retry, look for an attempt stuck in progress rather than assuming the cap is wrong. See Exam Runner.

Resuming rather than restarting

When somebody who already has an attempt in progress presses Start, they resume it. They do not get a fresh paper. This is what makes closing the browser a non-strategy, and it is why the cap counts in-progress rows.

Locking

The lock policy decides when an exam stops accepting a given candidate:

Policy	Behaviour
auto	The plugin decides from the cap and the result
cap_only	Locked only when the attempt cap is used up
manual	Locked only when you say so
never	Never locked

Choosing a mode

• A class in a room, one sitting - access code, a tight window, one attempt.
• Learners with accounts on your site - by role, a cap of two or three, a cooldown long enough to make them revise.
• A public practice paper - open, unlimited attempts, results immediately.
• Candidates who will never have accounts - guest, so you still get a name and an email against every result.
• A named group, repeatedly - cohorts PRO.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Usual cause
“You do not have access” for everyone but admins	The mode is Restricted and the Cohorts module is not installed.
A candidate cannot retry	An attempt is still in progress, or the cooldown has not elapsed.
Guests are not being asked for a name	The mode is Open, not Guest. Open asks for nothing.
The exam is invisible before its start time	That is the window working. Check Open from.
Caching serves one person’s state to another	The exam page is served uncached once somebody is signed in or has started as a guest. If you see this, check that a proxy in front of WordPress is honouring the no-cache headers.

What to do next

• Decide what happens once they are in: Exam Runner.
• Require another exam first with Prerequisites PRO.
• Manage named groups with Cohorts PRO.