Building Quiz

Template:Quizzes After a teacher has created a quiz activity, they may click on the edit tab of the quiz. The way this tab looks, depends if a student has taken the quiz or if the teacher is still allowed to modify the quiz. There is one view for a quiz which has not been taken (compiling view) and the other for one where students has taken the quiz. Other pages describe how to preview an existing quiz or editing questions.

Compiling a new quiz

Overall process

After creating a quiz activity module, the teacher will be shown a quiz compiling screen. Here the teacher can select questions to move in and out of a quiz. Quiz questions are usually stored in categories. It is also possible to create new questions from this screen and these questions will be added to the displayed category.

and categorize your quiz questions and then add them to the quiz. What you will see on this screen depends on whether students have already started attempts at the quiz.

• On the left side of the screen (or in the middle if the quiz has already been attempted) you’ll see a block where the questions you’ve added to the current quiz are displayed. If this is a new quiz you will not have any questions there and Moodle tells you this.
• On the right side of the screen (if the quiz has not yet been attempted), you’ll see a Categories section above the question editing block. This is where you can add new questions, edit existing questions, or move questions between categories. This is explained on the page Question bank.

Adding questions to a quiz

Once you’ve created your questions, you’ll need to add them to the quiz. There are many types in the Question bank that you can use. Alternatively, you may choose to import questions.

First use the 'Category' menu to select the category containing the questions you want to add (item 3 in the diagram below).

The chevrons (<< icons) to the left of the questions are used to add individual questions to the quiz. You can also select several questions using the checkboxes on the left of the question list and then click the "Add to quiz" button at the bottom of the list to add then all at once. If you want to add all the displayed questions then use the 'Select all' link.

This shows four methods of adding questions including adding random questions dealt with in more detail below (Moodle 1.8)

Once you’ve added a question to the quiz, it appears on the left side of the screen in the quiz question list. The question is still selectable on the right, but you can only add it to the quiz once. If you select the question in the category list again and add it to the quiz, nothing will happen. Template:Moodle 1.8 If you have created a lot of questions, you may want to sort the question list by type and name or by age. You can also choose to display the question text below each question name by checking the box "Show question text in the question list" above the question list (Moodle 1.8 onwards).

Once you’ve added the questions to the quiz, you can change the order of the questions by clicking the arrow buttons on the left side of the list of quiz questions.

You will also need to set the grade for each question. You can set the number of points for each question in the Grade column. This allows you to set the relative weight of each question in the quiz. You may want to make certain questions or question types worth more than others. You should also set the 'Maximum grade' for the whole quiz. This does not have to be equal to the sum of the grades for the individual questions. The grades achieved by the students will be rescaled to be out of this maximum grade. After adjusting these grade settings you should click on the 'Save grades' button.

Adding random questions

A random question will be replaced, when the student attempts the quiz, with a randomly-chosen question from the currently selected category. A different random question will be selected for each attempt.

This means that different students are likely to get a different selection of questions when they attempt this quiz. When a quiz allows multiple attempts for each student then each attempt will also contain a new selection of questions.

The same question will never appear twice in a quiz. If you include several random questions then different questions will always be chosen for each of them. If you mix random questions with non-random questions then the random questions will be chosen so that they do not duplicate one of the non-random questions.

The grade for the randomly chosen question will be rescaled so that the maximum grade is what you have chosen as the grade for the random question.

To add random questions, use the drop-down menu at the bottom of the Question Bank on the right. Select the number of random questions you wish to add, and click 'Add'.

note that the menu for adding random questions is found below the questions on the right-hand side of the screen

Previewing questions

Clicking on the magnifying glass next to a question in the Question Bank will open a preview window in which you can test the question.

When you’re done, you will probably also want to preview your entire quiz by clicking on the Preview tab. This will bring you to the Quiz attempt page, but in teacher preview mode.

After quiz has been attempted

If the quiz has already been attempted you will see a notice saying that you cannot add or remove questions. You can, however, delete the quiz attempts (you access them clicking View x quiz attempts (y Students), where 'x' stands for the number of attempts by 'y' students) and will then again be able to add or delete questions as explained above. The reason you can not do this when there are already attempts is that this would lead to confusion, both on the part of the student and on the part of Moodle itself which would not be able to interpret the student responses that have already been saved.

You can still edit questions and you can change the grade for questions. So instead of deleting a bad question you can edit it to explain the situation to the student and then you can set the grade for the question to zero. After you make such changes you should regrade the quiz by clicking on the Results tab and then the Regrade tab.

See also

• Question bank
• Question categories
• Import questions
• Export questions
• How to create a quiz video