Creating a Quiz in Moodle

How to Create a Quiz in MoodleBefore creating a quiz you must first create a bank of questions. This bank of questionscan be as large as you like and can be used in multiple different quizzes.Note: the more questions that you add to your question bank the more options that youwill have when creating your quizzes.Creating questions:To create your question bank you first have to access the ‘Question bank’ folder found inthe ‘ADMINISTRATION’ box at the bottom left hand side of your course page.You may wish to create multiple banks of questions each covering a different topic, if soyou will need to create a category for each bank. To create a category you will first needto click on the ‘Categories’ link, then name the category, and finish by clicking the ‘Addcategory’ button.Once you have created your categories you can then click on the ‘Questions’ link tobegin creating questions.IT Training Services 1

Before you click ‘Create a new question …’ make sure that you ‘Select a category’ fromone of the categories that you just created, assigning each new question to theappropriate category as you go.In total there are 30 different types of question that can be created.If you click on each question a brief description of that question type can be found in theright hand panel.Detailed instructions for every question type can be found by selecting the type whichinterests you, then clicking ‘Add’ and finally, scrolling to the very bottom of the page andclicking the ‘Moodle Docs for this page’ link.IT Training Services 2

Here we’ll create a ‘Multiple choice’ question. Firstly you have to name the questionand then type in the actual text of the question. Please note that you can add pictures,web links or even media clips to the ‘Question text’ box too.Next you can set the ‘Default mark’ that the student will receive for getting the questionright, you can also create some general feedback which the student will receive uponcompleting the question regardless of whether or not they get the question correct.Note: The ‘Default mark’ will almost always be set to ‘1’ but if you add a more difficult ortime consuming question (such as an essay question) you may wish to increase the‘Default mark’ to reflect the extra effort required to answer it correctly.Now you can set whether or not you will allow multiple answers, whether or not you wantthe choices to be shuffled and how you want to label the choices.Note: It is usually better to shuffle the choices so that you don’t have to worry aboutputting the right answer in a different slot every time.Next you can add the possible answers for you multiple choice quiz. You can have asmany possible answers to your question as you want, just keep clicking the ‘Blanks for 3more choices’ button until there are enough blank ‘Choice’ boxes to fulfil your needs.Note: Any ‘Choice’ boxes that are left blank will not appear as possible answers to thequestion.IT Training Services 3

To create each answer you have to type the answer itself in to the ‘Choice’ box. Thenyou have to set the ‘Grade’ for each possible answer and the ‘Feedback’ that the studentwill receive if they choose that particular answer.Note: You will usually set the ‘Grade’ to ‘100%’ for the correct answer and leave everyother grade as ‘None’. If you have chosen to allow multiple answers you may wish to splitthe grade across all of the correct choices.If you choose to leave the ‘Feedback’ boxes empty, general feedback will providedinstead. This general feedback can be configured by clicking on the ‘Combinedfeedback’ tab and completing the relevant fields.If you plan to create a quiz that will allow multiple attempts at the same question youmay wish to configure a penalty for taking more than one try to arrive at the correctanswer. To do so, click on the ‘Multiple tries’ tab and complete the relevant fields.IT Training Services 4

Finally, you can add tags to your question. Generally tags are used to find and sort thequestions in your question bank but if you intend to create an ‘Adaptive Quiz’ you mustto use the ‘adpq’ tags to indicate the difficulty of each question in your question bank.The ‘adpq’ official tags run from 1-100 but you can use whichever difficulty scale you like(1-10, 1-20 etc.) as long as you are consistent throughout your question bank.If you wish to create your own difficulty scale outside of the scope of the official tags youcan enter your own ‘adpq’ tag in the ‘Other tags’ box.Now that you’ve finished creating your question make sure that you click the ‘Savechanges’ button at the bottom of the page to save your question and add it to yourquestion bank.IT Training Services 5

Creating a Standard Quiz:Once you have created a question bank containing enough questions you can thencreate a quiz. Firstly you need to click the ‘Turn editing on’ button from the top right handcorner of your course page.Then you need to choose a topic box to host your quiz, remember that you can addmore topic boxes by clicking the ‘+’ button at the bottom of your course page andrename your topics by clicking the cog button directly under the topic nameNote: You may have to uncheck the ‘Use default section name box’ in order to renameyour topic.Once you have chosen a topic box to hold your quiz you can click the ‘Add an activityor resource’ link to begin.Next you should scroll down the list of activities until you can select ‘Quiz’ and then click‘Add’.IT Training Services 6

Next you need to name your quiz and provide a description.In the ‘Timing’ section you can set an opening and closing date/time for your quiz. Youcan also set a time limit for taking the quiz. Finally you can set how the quiz will behave ifa student doesn’t manage to finish before the time limit expires.In the ‘Grade’ section you can use ‘Grade category’ so set where the quiz grades areplaced (this is only relevant if you are using the gradebook). You can also set how manytimes an individual student is allowed to attempt the quiz and if multiple attempts areallowed how the final score will be determined across those attempts.In the ‘Layout’ section you can determine the order of the questions, how many questionsshould appear on each page and if the student taking the quiz must answer the questionssequentially or not.Note: Allowing the questions to be randomly shuffled will often be the best optionespecially if several students will be attempting the same quiz together at the same time.IT Training Services 7

In the ‘Question behaviour’ section you can set whether or not questions with multipleparts will be shuffled or not. This will only work if you have set random shuffling to on withineach question too. Conversely if you set ‘Shuffle within questions’ to ‘no’ here then evenif you have enabled it within a particular questions themselves the shuffling will not occur.In this section you can also set how the student will receive feedback. For instance if youset ‘Deferred feedback’ the student will received no feedback until they havecompleted the entire quiz.The ‘Review options’ section allows you to customise the feedback that a student will seein even more detail.The ‘Extra restrictions on attempts’ section allows you to set a password that studentswould then have to use in order to attempt the quiz. If you have set your quiz to allowmultiple attempts you can also enforce a waiting period between attempts here.IT Training Services 8

The ‘Overall feedback’ section allows you to set feedback for the whole quiz based onhow well the student has performed. The top box allows you to set feedback for a studentthat has scored 100% and the bottom box allows you to set feedback for a student thathad scored 0%. In between the top and bottom boxes you can set as many feedbackbands that you like by entering a percentage in the ‘Grade boundary’ and then enteringappropriate feedback for that band in the ‘Feedback’ box.Once you have finished entering all of the options for your quiz, make sure that you clickthe ‘Save and return to course’ button to continue.Now you need to add questions from your bank to the quiz. Firstly click on the quiz itself.IT Training Services 9

Next click on the ‘Edit quiz’ button.On the next screen, before you begin to add questions you can set the ‘Maximum grade’for your quiz. The maximum grade acts as a scaling device for your quiz. For instance ifyou set it to 100.00 then regardless of the number of questions that you add and theirrespective point value you will end up with a final grade out of 100, effectively apercentage grade.To begin adding questions to your quiz click ‘Add’.At this stage you can choose either ‘from question bank’ or ‘a random question’.If you choose ‘from question bank’ you will then need to select the category where yourquestion bank is stored.IT Training Services 10

You should now be able to see the questions that you created earlier. Tick the boxes nextto the question that you wish to add to your quiz. If you would like to add all of thequestions in the category tick the top box.Once you have selected the questions that you would like to add click the ‘Add selectedquestions to the quiz’ button to complete your quiz.If you have a large bank of questions you may wish to take a random selection ofquestions from your bank to populate your quiz. If so then instead of clicking ‘fromquestion bank’ select ‘a random question’.You will then be presented with the window below. From here you should again selectyour question bank from the ‘Category’ list and then choose how many random questionsfrom that bank you want to add to your quiz. Finally click the ‘Add random question’button to complete your quiz.IT Training Services 11

Creating an Adaptive QuizThe other type of quiz that you may want to create is an ‘Adaptive Quiz’.If you have a large bank of questions that are accurately tagged (with the ‘adpq’ tag)to indicate their difficulty, you can use an ‘Adaptive Quiz’ to discover what level a studenthas currently attained.After adding the name and description of the quiz you can then select your ‘Questionpool’. Next you can enter the ‘Startling level of difficulty’ this will be the level of difficultyof the first question asked. For instance if you have tagged your questions with difficultytags ranging from 1-20 then you may want to start the quiz with a 10 difficulty question. Ifthe student gets the first question right then their next question will be difficulty 11. If theyget the first question wrong then their next question will be difficulty 9 and so on.You can use the ‘Lowest level of difficulty’ and ‘Highest level of difficulty’ boxes to set theboundaries of how easy or difficult the questions can get.IT Training Services 12

Note: If you set any of these levels outside of the tagged difficulty range of your questions,the quiz will instead use a question with the closest possible difficulty level to the one youhave set.Once your ‘Adaptive quiz’ has discovered the level of the student taking the test it willautomatically stop and produce a result. You can adjust the ‘Standard Error to stop’number to adjust how precise the result needs to be before the quiz will stop.If you want the quiz to ask a minimum number of questions before stopping you canadd a number to the ‘Minimum number of questions’ box. Likewise with the ‘Maximumnumber of questions’ box.Once you have finished entering all of the options for your quiz, make sure that you clickthe ‘Save and return to course’ button to complete the creation of your ‘Adaptive quiz’.More information on how to properly set the ‘Standard Error to stop’ and adaptivequizzes in general can be found here.IT Training Services 13