Why use it?

Quizzes are a good way of assessing students either in a formative or a summative way and to provide instant feedback to the students as they allow for automated scoring and score-dependent feedback.

Creating a quiz in Moodle is a two stage process. You need to set up the Quiz and then add questions.

Step 1: Add a Quiz

Go to the course page and Turn editing on. Scroll to the section where you want your Quiz to be displayed, click Add an activity or resource and select Quiz.

Step 2: Settings

Give the quiz a meaningful Name and use the Description to explain what the students will have to do, e.g. whether they can attempt the quiz multiple times.

Timing

Specific times can be set for when the quiz is accessible for attempts to be made. You can set a time to Open the quiz and Close the quiz. After the closing time, students will not be able to start a new attempt. Answers that the student submits after the quiz closing date will be saved but they will not be marked.

After the quiz has closed, you can allow students to see the quiz description and review their attempts based on the settings selected for ‘Review options’ (see below).

You can optionally choose a Time limit after which Moodle will automatically submit the quiz with answers completed to that point. In the absence of a time limit, students can take as long as they like to complete the quiz prior to the closing time.

The When time expires setting will control what happens if the student fails to submit their quiz attempt before the time expires.

Grade

• Grade category – set the category in which the activity’s grades are placed in the gradebook

• Grade to pass – set a pass grade, which then would define activity completion.

• Attempts allowed – set the number of allowed attempts. Formative (self test) quizzes will usually allow students multiple attempts, summative (exam condition) quizzes only one.

• Grading method – which grade of several attempts (highest, average etc.) is recorded.

Layout

Here you can define that number of questions that would be displayed on one page.

You can also add Page breaks later on when adding the questions.

Question behaviour

• Shuffle within questions - If set to yes, in the case of multiple choice questions, the possible answers are displayed in a random order.

• How questions behave - provides a range of settings to control when/how feedback is displayed. The default deferred feedback is often the preferred option. This means students will take all questions and submit the quiz before getting any feedback.

Review options

Use these to control what students see in terms of feedback, marks, correct answer indication (and more) when they check previous attempts at a quiz and during an attempt if using adaptive mode (to be set in Question behaviour).

Appearance

Show the user’s picture - Showing user pictures during while completing the quiz can be set here, which might be useful if the quiz activity is used as part of an invigilated exam.

Decimal places in grades and question grades - Use this to specify the number of places after the decimal point in the grades.

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Extra restrictions on attempts

An array of security options are available to control how quizzes are taken in exam settings, such as setting a password or browser security.

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Overall Feedback

General feedback that students get at the end of the quiz. It can be tailored to grade boundaries if required.

Common module settings

Use this if you want to restrict access to specific groups.

Activity completion

If activity completion is enabled for the course and set to Show activity as complete when conditions are met, you can make the completion dependent on receiving a passing grade (to be set in Grade).

When you have finished, click Save and Return to course. You can now add questions.

Step 3: Add questions

Go to the quiz activity and select Add question.

To add a new question, click Add + a new question…

Select the type of question you wish to add from the list of question types and click Add.

On the next screen, provide a Question name – the student doesn’t see this but use something that is unique and meaningful for organising quiz questions. Add the question stem to Question text.

Scroll down to change the Default mark of 1 and add any General feedback if required. This is additional to specific feedback that can be provided for each answer. If used, it is displayed to all students regardless of their answer choice.

In the next section, use One or multiple answers to control whether one or more answer options are allowed. Leave Shuffle the choices selected, if the answer options should be shuffled each time the question is displayed. This is useful in exam situations where students might be tempted to look at someone else’s screen. However, it is also useful if students are using the quiz formatively and viewing the questions repeatedly. Use Number the choices if you want other than the default ‘a, b, c’ for answer options.

Then enter the answers, the grade and any specific feedback. This will result in automatic feedback depending on the grade i.e. the answer marked 100% will get a Correct message and the others Incorrect. The exact text of the automatic feedback is set in the Combined feedback section.

You can explore the other options but a simple question will not require them. As you proceed with question set up, you may want to regularly Save changes and continue editing.

Make any further changes as result of using the Preview function then click Save change.

You can then use Create a new question … to create further questions.

Question types

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) - This is one of the most common question types. You can create single-answer (radio buttons) and multiple-answer questions (square buttons).

The process for adding a multiple-answer MCQ is the same as for adding a single-answer question except that you need to choose Multiple answers allowed.

True/False Question - In this question type there is only a choice of True or False. It is effectively the same as an MCQ but with only 2 responses.

Short Answer question - In a short answer question, the student types in a word or phrase in response to a question or to complete a statement (as below). The answer must match pre-defined answers exactly. It is a good idea to keep the required answer as short as possible to avoid missing a correct answer that is phrased or spelt differently. You can specify whether the answer is case sensitive and also use wild cards where spelling may vary.

Numerical question - From the student perspective, a numerical question is just like a short-answer question except that answers must be numerical and can have an accepted error range e.g. if the answer to the question below is 3.15, an accepted error of 0.05 will mean that any value between 3.1 and 3.2 will be accepted as correct.

You can also grade the unit independently of the number to allow for alternative correct answers using different units e.g. 150 cm and 1.5 m. The unit can appear on the left as well as the right of the number e.g. £100.

Calculated Simple Question - Calculated questions offer a way to create a series of numerical questions using wildcards that are substituted with random values when the quiz is taken.

Each time a student takes the question, a different set of values will appear for {b} and {h}. There are also settings to control the range of values and the number of variations.

Essay Question - These are used for questions where longer answers are needed. Unlike other question types, they have to be manually graded. A student can type their answer into a text box and/or include an attachment. You can provide a template for them to structure their response.

Matching Question - This type of question requires the student to pair two columns of information e.g. cities to countries in the example below.

Question bank

The Question bank allows you to organise all quiz questions used on your course. Questions can be added directly to the Question bank or while building a quiz.

Add questions to the question bank

In the quick navigation menu at the top, select Question bank.

Select a Category for the question. (If you have not created categories yet, you can add the question to the default category and sort it later.)

Select Create a new question.

Create question categories

You can subdivide questions on a course into categories to match the different quiz topics. To start with, there is one default category for the course. To add more, select Question bank in the menu and then expand the drop-down menu at the top of the page and click Categories.

This will display any existing categories and provide the option to add more in Add category. Select a Parent category if it is not the default category. Type a Name and provide Category info if required. Then Add category.

Move questions to a new category

Click Question bank / Questions.

Select questions, click the categories drop-down, select the required category and press Move to >>

Use questions from the question bank

To add a new question go to Edit quiz and click Add + a new question…

Select (tick) the required question(s) from the Question bank and click Add to quiz.

Step 4: Review quiz before use

Click on the quiz and select Preview Quiz.
This will enable you to see and take the questions as a student would. However, it also gives you the option to make changes via Edit question as you proceed.
Once you finish the attempt, you will see the results as a student would see them and can make further changes from there via Edit question.

Change settings

To make changes to how the quiz as a whole behaves e.g. number of attempts, use Settings in the quick navigation menu.

Add, edit, remove or reorder quiz questions

Editing of existing questions can be done during Preview (see above) but to add new questions or reorder questions, you need to select Questions in the quick navigation menu again.

Use the arrow and rubbish bin icon to move or delete questions.

To edit a question, click the red cog icon to the left of the title or click on the title.

Edit quiz grading

Moodle uses defaults for scoring questions and grading quizzes which may not be what you require.

Click the quiz and select Questions in the quick navigation menu.

Change the Maximum grade as required e.g. you may want to change this from 10.00 to 100.00 and click Save. Regardless of the number of questions and point score the overall grade will be based on this.

Alter the individual question scores using Marked out of and use ‘enter’ on your keyboard to save.

Step 5: Make the quiz available to students

This will depend on how you have chosen to restrict access while building and testing the quiz:

• If you have hidden the quiz, Turn editing on and select Show on the Edit drop down.

• If you are using Timing, the quiz will be released on the chosen date. You can alter this via Settings in the quick navigation menu if required.

• If you’re using other methods e.g. Restrict access make the necessary adjustment.

Use Switch role to student to test availability.

Step 6: View and manage quiz results

To view results, once a quiz has run (or during its progress) click the quiz and select Attempts: (number).

In the top part of the subsequent screen, you can specify exactly which students you want to report on. The default is enrolled users who have attempted the quiz. Make your selection, click Show report and scroll down the page to see results.

The results report provides a breakdown by question of how each student has performed on the quiz.

The final section shows the distribution of grades across the grade ranges.

Review / Regrade student attempts

You can override the automatic grading on a particular student attempt e.g. because you did not anticipate all correct answers on a short answer question. You can also regrade all attempts e.g. because you have changed the scoring on a particular question and need to apply it to all student attempts.

To override an individual attempt, select Review Attempt under the student’s name. This takes you to the detailed version of their attempt where you can comment and override marks on each question as required. Remember to Save any changes.

To leave the review screen, click Finish Review. The changes will be automatically reflected on the results page.

If you make a change to question grades that will affect all students who have already attempted the question, then use Regrade all (above the results) to apply the change.

Manually grade essays

If you have Essay type questions, you will need to grade them manually.

Click the quiz and select Attempts: (number).

Essay questions will be designated as Requires Grading on the report. Select Review attempt.

Scroll to the essay question and click Make comment or override mark.

Make any comments and award a mark. Then click Save.

Scroll to the end and click Finish Review on next screen. Then click Attempts: (number) to return to the Grades screen where the essay question mark is now showing and the quiz itself has been graded.

Bulk downloading of essay questions

If you have a large number of Essay type questions, you may wish to bulk download them in order to read them offline.

Open the quiz activity and go to Results in the quick navigation menu at the top.

Choose Download essay submissions from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.

You can now choose how you would like the downloaded folder structured.  If the quiz only has one essay question, it is simplest to select Essay question wise.  Unless you have allowed an online text response to the question, it is unlikely you would want to include either a text response file or question text file.  Once you have selected your settings, click Download.

A Zip File will download. You can open this in whatever way you normally do so.

If you have chosen to download the submissions Essay question wise (see above), your folder will be named in accordance with the question name.

Inside the folder will be a folder for each of the participants with their submissions inside.

Bulk grading of essay questions

When you have a large number of essay questions to grade, use Results/Manual grading. Click grade in the To grade column.

This displays the submissions in a list (default is 5 to a page) for you to work through. Save and go to next page as you complete each page.

On completion, you will be taken back automatically to the list of questions needing grading which will now show 0. If you want to manually intervene in any of the automatically graded questions, click Also show questions that have been graded automatically. This enables you to check all attempts at a particular question and make any adjustments.