Working around R/Exams not having "follow-on"

Our department is just starting the process of moving our questions into R/Exams. Up until now we've been using an in-house system that allows for "follow-on". What I'm meaning by "follow-on" is that, let's say part (b) of a question uses the answer to part (a), then if the student gets part (a) wrong but correctly uses their incorrect part (a) answer in calculating (b), follow-on would allow them to be marked correctly for part (b). Not having follow-on (as R/Exams doesn't) would mean they'll get part (b) wrong for their mistake in part (a), even if they did part (b) correctly. I'm therefore wondering how we can get around this. Some of my initial ideas are below. Really keen to hear any comments on these, what has worked for people in the past, and alternative ideas. Note that we are using Moodle. **Multiple Tries** One option would be to set up assessments so that students can have multiple, or even an unlimited number of attempts, at a question. Possible issues with this are: - Issue 1: If a student can't get an earlier part to a question correct, even after multiple attempts at a question, they still won't be able to get any later parts to the question correct that rely on that. Although the risk of this would be reduced if they are allowed multiple tries. - Issue 2: Let's say a question has a large number of parts to it. If a student gets one part wrong, then each time they reattempt the question they'd have to do all of it again, even the parts they did correctly. This could frustrate students. Note that this isn't an issue with not having follow-on specifically: any question with many parts will have this issue. **Setting up questions so that later sub-questions don't use answers to earlier sub-questions** We could design the questions so that the information needed to answer each question part doesn't include the student's answer to any earlier question parts. For example, a standard confidence intervals question would go something like: - Calculate the upper and lower limits of the interval. - Interpret the interval. Such a setup would be problematic without follow-on, because if a student made a mistake in calculating the interval, their interpretation could be incorrect only because their interval was incorrect, but not because they couldn't interpret their interval correctly. However, if instead of asking students to state the upper and lower limits of the interval, we went something like: - State the R command or formula used to calculate the interval. - Assuming the UL and LL are ..., select the appropriate interpretation. In this latter setup, since the student's answer to the calculation part isn't used in the interpretation part, not being able to calculate the interval correctly wouldn't rule out them being able to get the interpretation part correct. **Showing Earlier...