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Quiz UI redesign scenarios - Entering questions into an exam

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Introductory video

Organizing questions and adding them into an exam

Unless exams are very simple, teachers often have a natural set of categories to organize questions in, from course curriculum or from the actual material of the course. In tech-speak, this can be regarded as metadata of the actual questions.


Mack Marketing


  • carefully crafted, can't reuse the questions (but may be able to use for reference)

Mack primarily creates just exams. For him, exams are one-time wholes and each question is a part of the whole, tightly bound to that one exam.

However, Mack can use his questions as templates, or at least sources for inspiration when creating new exams. Thus he keeps a copy all his exams, sorted by date. If he had time, he sometimes wonders, he would also create an thematical index of all the questions, so that whenever he needed a question from a certain theme, he could just look at the index and see which exams contained a question he needs.

Sometimes Mack finds himself in a real hurry when a student wants a renewal (another try or another, separate date for taking the exam for the first time) for an exam, since some, even the more rarely taken exams he has don't have question banks. In this case, he might be willing to compromise how unique wholes his exams are, so that he can have a question bank full of spare questions, ready for use for surprising renewal exams.


Ida Informatics


Based on the themes that come from course curriculum, Ida has organized her questions in categories. Under most themes she has further divided the questions into different difficulty levels and for most a given exam, she usually has about 60% of easier and 40% of more difficult questions. Since she has a lot (i.e. dozens ... thousands) of questions for each course, she would find it useful to categorize questions based on different criterias – that is, to be capable of tagging questions, as well as searching for particular questions based on their content, tags or other properties.

To distribute questions according to a formula, Ida would like to be able to create a test of 100 questions dispersed something like the following: 10% of questions from category 1, 15% of questions from category 2, 25% of questions from category 3, etc. The questions would randomly appear on the exam. BUT on the other hand, there are times when Ida wants to select the exact questions for the exam and even place them in exact spots on the exam. OR select the exact questions but have Moodle randomly distribute them on the exam. (Do you think she'll ever be satisfied???)

Harvey Historian


Each time the exam is taken, Harvey picks one or two questions for each exam book from his comprehensive selection of questions.


Grace Grader



Susan Support


Fred



Paul Pedagogue

National Exam

As I've pointed out on other pages, Paul uses National Central Exams on paper for grading. He doesn't change them unless there is some unusual imbalance in material coverage that would be unfair to his students.

Organizing Interactive ("quiz") Questions

He and several other colleagues like to share resources like quiz questions. They try to organize them in categories that will help. But being able to tag them would be much more flexible. There are many questions that can be useful in many different subjects and levels. A good search function and a meta marking system would also be valuable.

Random questions

Since Paul's big interest is not absolute grading he is not especially interested in random questions (which are usually used to making cheating more difficult). He might have some training quizzes toward the end of sections/courses that could randomly choose some questions out of a larger bank.