Frequently Asked Question

Quizzes can be a great tool for students and instructors. You may want to utilize quizzes for the immediate, specific feedback, which helps students know they’re on the right track.

Getting a quiz started:

• Turn editing on
• Add resource/activity
• Select the Quiz activity
• Next, you’ll edit the quiz settings

Quizzes are unique in that they have the "edit settings” and the “edit quiz” pages. The settings are basically the quiz environment and restrictions. Editing the quiz is where you’ll actually add or edit the specific quiz questions.

Quiz Settings:

1. In the settings, you can add open/close dates or a time limit for the quiz.
2. Grade: The grade section here actually isn’t where you change the max grade/points possible, but it is where you can limit the number of attempts. Practice quizzes might be best with unlimited attempts, for example.
3. Layout: I recommend your layout is at most set to “Every 3 questions” so students don’t get timed out for inactivity without their answers saving. (One question per page works well, too.)
4. Review options: At the very least, please keep “Points” selected in the 3 columns from the right. Depending on whether you have enabled an open/close date, this can restrict students from seeing the right answer for awhile after they’ve taken the quiz.

Note: It may help prevent cheating to keep the correct answers hidden until after a quiz has "closed." Example shown here:

1. Extra restrictions on attempts: If you are using an online quiz for a midterm or final, you may want to use the Browser security setting, “Full screen pop up...” to prevent students from being able to copy and paste questions directly into a search engine.
2. Hit “Save and display” at the bottom of the page

Edit Quiz:

1. You can now click “Edit quiz,” which you can also find in the Administration block once you’ve entered the quiz
2. In this view you can edit the maximum grade overall and per question
3. You can click “Add” to add a new question from scratch, from your question bank, or a question at random from your bank.
4. Accessibility: Keep in mind some question types are more accessible because students can use a keyboard. For example, multiple choice or true/false would be more accessible than a drag/drop question.

Multiple choice questions:

1. You must enter a question name, but it isn’t very important how you name it.
2. Question text – the question itself
3. General feedback vs. Answer-specific feedback
4. Select the correct answer(s) by giving it a grade of 100%

Bonus:
One unconventional use for quizzes that worked well for one instructor was for students to self-report their reading. The automatic grading from multiple choice quizzes meant these scores didn’t have to be written on paper and entered in manually one student at a time. If they had read 25% of the required weekly reading, they got 25%; 50% read = a score of 50%; 75% = 75%; 100% = 100%.

Note: Overridden grades
Keep in mind any overridden grades (the orange, highlighted grades) will not communicate with the in-activity grading. For example, if you’ve given a student a 0 because their Week 1 Forum was late, but then gave them the opportunity to turn it in later for partial credit, you will either have to (a) remove the override so you can grade it in the forum or (b) manually change their grade in the gradebook and keep it overridden. The easiest way I know how to do this is (1) go to “Single view” and select your assignment. (2) Click “None” under “Override” and save at the bottom of the page. (3) You can also check “Perform bulk insert” and insert 0s for any empty grades. Hit save again.

I’ve seen this cause problems particularly with quizzes, which instructors generally trust to automatically feed into the gradebook. If you’ve entered in a 0 (or any other manual score to override this grade), and a student goes in to take the quiz later, it won’t automatically populate their score in the gradebook until you remove the override in the “Single view” tab.

Minimize Risk of Cheating
We have a Knowledgebase article on steps you can take to try and minimize the risk of students cheating on an online quiz.

Current for Moodle 3.5 (current version 11/1/2019)