Quiz Activity (Exam or Test)

Working with Quizzes in Moodle

Quizzes are one of the more unusual activities in Moodle and have some added depth of functionality which makes them seem a bit more complicated.

They take a while to set up but are often very low maintenance afterwards as many question types are or can be self-grading. You can also be very intentional in the design of your quizzes to discourage cheating.

  1. Get your Quiz Questions Together: Before you make any quizzes you should create a pool of questions to pull from, in Moodle that’s called the question bank.  If you don’t plan to reuse a quiz question you can add the question directly to a quiz.
  2. Create the Quiz activity “container”: this sets the behavior and worth of a quiz in your course. We have preexisting Sample Quiz Containers you can import into your own course if you’re not comfortable creating your own from scratch.
  3. Populate your Quiz: If you’ve set up a Question Bank you can add questions one at a time, add multiple questions at once from the same category and/or add questions pulled at random from a set category into your chosen quiz. You can then manually rearrange questions or break up these questions by manually adding page breaks, automatically adding page breaks and even add headings within the quiz.

We suggest you keep students on a quiz page for about 5 minutes per page to minimize the chance of data-loss during attempts should something go wrong.

Some quiz questions will grade automatically. For those that don’t or for when you need to override a grade, you can manually grade quiz questions. You can also fine-tune point values in your quizzes and either change the total worth of a quiz in the gradebook or change the weight of an individual question within a quiz.

Students (and instructors!) can practice taking a Moodle Quiz in the Moodle 101 Self-Guided Orientation.

Sometimes the DRC will require you provide a student extra time, number of attempts, for your quizzes. You can also grant special access to an individual student or Add student(s) to a group for unlimited quiz time access per attempt.

Check and set a quiz password to restrict access or remove or confirm an old password.

Remove unused questions one-at-a-time or empty the whole quiz of questions to repopulate or template quizzes as you see fit.
NOTE: Unless a quiz question was added directly to a quiz, one at a time, it will still exist in the question bank.

Should students suffer a technical issue during the attempt you can remove an quiz attempt for one or more people so they may try again or just give them additional attempts.

Student’s can’t see their Quiz Grades? Make sure the quiz is visible (in both the course and gradebook) and that Points are checked under Review Options.

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