Creating a Moodle Quiz

Step 1 – Create your categories

We strongly recommend creating questions in your question bank first, using categories to keep them organised, and then adding questions to your quiz. This has several advantages:

• Easily find and reuse questions across multiple quizzes​.

• Avoid unnecessary duplication.

• Maintain better version control, since all quizzes can draw from the same set of questions.

• Organise questions by topic, difficulty, assessment type etc.

• Share groups of questions using the export/import function.

• Draw questions at random from a category, so that each student receives a different set of questions in the quiz.

1. Log in to Moodle and navigate to your course.

2. Click on More and select Question bank.

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3. Select Categories from question bank drop-down menu.

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4. Click Add category.

5. Give your category a name.

6. Parent category will normally be “Top for [course name]”. Change this if you would like to create sub-categories for an existing category.

Step 2 – Create your questions

1. Select Questions from question bank drop-down menu.

2. Choose the category you would like to add questions to from the search field.

3. Click Apply filters.

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4. Click Create a new question.

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5. Choose a question type and click Add.

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6. You will be taken to the settings page for your question. Settings vary across question types, but in general you will need to give your question a name, provide the question text, specify the correct answer/s (adding up to 100%) and offer distractors worth 0% (if applicable). Most questions types allow you to provide general feedback which will be the same for all students, combined feedback, for correct/partially correct/incorrect responses, or answer-specific feedback. When students see this feedback is determined by the review options setting (Step 3). When you have finished, click Save changes.

7. Continue adding items to your Question Bank categories until you have enough content ready to build a quiz.

Step 3 – Create your quiz

1. Turn Edit mode on. 

2. In the topic where you want the quiz to appear, click Add an activity or resource and select Quiz.

3. Give your quiz a Name.

4. Specify whether it is summative, formative or neither (dummy activity). Summative activities can be mapped to SITS for transferring marks. For guidance on this, see SITS Marks Transfer.

5. Description – Provide clear instructions. This is always visible unless the quiz has been hidden. We have provided a template showing the type of information we recommend including:

Timing

6. Open / Close the quiz – Choose when the quiz is available to students. These dates will display on the module page.

7. Time limit – When enabled, a countdown timer is displayed during the quiz (students can hide this). This is useful when you want students to complete the quiz within a larger availability window, while limiting the amount of time they have once they begin.

8. When time expires – This setting controls what happens if a student fails to submit their quiz attempt before the time expires. We recommend Open attempts are submitted automatically to ensure work is not lost if a student fails to submit on time.

Grade

9. Attempts allowed - Controls how many attempts your students are allowed to take. For practice quizzes, you may want to change this to unlimited.

Layout

11. New Page – We recommend you set this to Every question. Student responses will automatically be saved each time they move to the next question. Students can also flag a question that they wish to return to later.

Question behaviour

12. Shuffle within question – When enabled, answer options are presented in a random order each time a student attempts the quiz.

Review options

13. These options control what information students see when they review a quiz attempt.

Extra restrictions on attempts

14. You can set a password that students must enter before accessing the quiz.

Overall Feedback

15. This is the feedback that is shown after a quiz has been attempted. You can also specify feedback depending on grade boundaries by clicking add 3 more feedback fields.

Save

16. Once you are happy with the settings, click Save and display.

Step 4 - Add questions to the quiz

1. Go to the Questions page of your quiz.

2. Click Add.

3. Select from question bank.

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4. You may need to switch to a different category to find the questions you want. Choose the correct category from the drop-down menu (1) and click Apply filters. The category you are currently viewing is displayed to the right of the drop-down menu (2).

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5. Select the questions you want to add.

6. Click Add the selected questions to the quiz.

7. If you would like the questions to appear in a random order for each student for each attempt, tick the Shuffle checkbox in the top right.

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8. You can set how many points each question is worth by changing the number in the box to the right of each question, and you can change the maximum grade by changing the number in the box top right at the top of the quiz. The default is one point per question and a 100.00 maximum grade.

Step 5 – Preview the quiz

Once you have finished adding questions, preview the quiz to see how it will appear to students.

• Go to the Quiz tab.

• Click the button Preview quiz.

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