Quiz activity

We highly recommend that you start with building a bank of questions to use in your quizzes. Moodle lets you create categories and subcategories which can be used to group your questions by topic and help keep your question bank organised.

Create categories

1. From your Moodle course page, click the More tab > Question bank.
   

   
2. You may find it helpful to reorder the columns as described here. We recommend having Question type, Question name and Actions as the first three columns but these are set as the default so you won't need to change them.

3. From the dropdown menu, select Categories.

   
   The course will already have a default category set up. You can create subcategories under it or create a new category. Click the Add category button.
4. Select the parent category. Top will create a new category for the course. Placing your category in another category makes it a subcategory of the parent.
5. Give the category a descriptive name and an optional description e.g. Economic definitions.
6. Click the Add category button.
7. Repeat the above steps to add more categories.

Create questions

1. Click on a category to start adding questions to it. Or, select Questions from the dropdown menu and select the category you wish to add questions to.
2. Click the Create a new question button.
3. You will be presented with a list of available question types. There is a short description for each one if you click the radio button next to it. Select a question type and then click the Add button.
4. Check the question category to ensure that it is the correct place under which you want to save your question.
5. Give the question a descriptive name that will help you identify what the question is about later, e.g. Consumer surplus definition. Students will not see the question name. Do not use numbers as they will not help going forward, and questions may be randomised within the quiz.
6. The rest of the form will vary according to the question type chosen. For a summary of each question type and links to their respective setup, see the MoodleDocs page on Question typesLink opens in a new window.
7. Click the Save changes button at the bottom of the page to save your question.
8. Repeat the above steps to add more questions.

Once you have questions in your question bank, you can create your actual quiz activity and choose the settings you want to apply to your quiz.

1. Enable Edit mode .
2. In the section where you want to add a quiz, click Add an activity or resource at the bottom or the Add an activity or resource icon in between other items.
3. Select Quiz.
4. Give the quiz a name and an optional description. Avoid putting instructions in the title; save them for the description. If you want students to see the instructions on the front page, tick the Display description on course page option.
5. Expand each section to choose the settings for the quiz and then click the Save and display button. With the default settings, students have unlimited attempts, can move freely between questions that are displayed one per page. There is no time limit and the scores and feedback display once they have completed the quiz. For summative assessments, you will need to adjust these settings. For a more detailed description of each setting, see the MoodleDocs page on Quiz settingsLink opens in a new window.
   
   

Click through the slides below to see how to create a quiz activity.

With your questions and quiz activity created, you need to add questions to the quiz.

1. From the Quiz tab, click the Add question button.
2. From the right-hand side of the page, click the Add button. Here you will have three options:
   • a new question - to create a brand new question and add it to your question bank
   • from question bank - to add a specific question already in your question bank
   • a random question - to add a randomly selected question from a defined category
     
     For more detailed guidance on adding questions to the quiz, see the MoodleDocs page on Adding questions.Link opens in a new window
3. You can design the layoutLink opens in a new window for your quiz by adding and removing page breaks between questions, adding section headings and shuffling the question order.
4. Check the number of marks assigned to each question and adjust if necessary by clicking on the Edit maximum mark button, typing the new maximum mark and pressing Enter. The mark here will be the default mark set in the question itself. Changing it here only affects the mark awarded for this quiz. If the mark will differ in each quiz, it is best to edit the question and change the default mark there.
5. Change the Maximum grade displayed at the top of the question list to match the total of marks and click the Save button.
6. Click on the Quiz tab and the Preview Quiz button to preview the quiz. Note that while you are able to attempt and submit the quiz, you are also subject to the settings applied so will only see what the students are allowed to see.

Click through the slides below to see how to add questions to a quiz, including how to add random questions from a category.

Moodle quiz reports provide detailed insights into quiz attempts, including:

• Grades ReportLink opens in a new window: Overview of students' attempts, status and grades for the quiz
• Responses ReportLink opens in a new window: Students' answers to each question.
• Statistics ReportLink opens in a new window: Quiz performance analysis, question difficulty, and discrimination index.
• Manual GradingLink opens in a new window: Manage and manually grade essay or short answer questions.

How to view quiz attempts

1. Click on the Quiz from your course page.
2. Click the Results tab, or the link to Attempts: x from the Quiz tab.
3. You will be presented with the Grades report. Click the dropdown list to select another of the above reports.