An Overview of Quizzes in Moodle

Quizzes in Moodle are used to evaluate student understanding of material. Moodle quizzes are comprised of a Quiz activity that contains one or more questions from your course's Question bank. The Quiz activity lets you administer a wide range of questions (see Quiz Question Types in Moodle) within a specific layout and order, provide different kinds of feedback based on how a student performed on the quiz, and control the ways that students can access the quiz. The Question bank serves as an organized repository of all the questions in your course, separate from any quiz activities that might use them.

Moodle provides separate tools to take surveys and polls, rather than assess students. See Add a Questionnaire Activity in Moodle, and Add a Choice Activity in Moodle (Single Question Poll). Note: Questions used in Questionnaires and Choice activities are not stored in the Quiz question bank.

The following steps summarize the recommended process for creating a quiz in Moodle:

Step 1

Create and organize questions in your course's Question bank.

The Moodle Question bank allows you to create, preview, and organize questions in categories before using them in a Quiz activity. Question categories can also be nested hierarchically. You can create new questions from scratch, or you can copy a Question bank from another Moodle course (such as one you taught in a prior semester), or you can import questions from a separate file. For more, see Use the Moodle Question Bank.

Step 2

Create and configure a new Quiz activity in the Section of your course where you want the quiz to appear.

A Quiz activity in Moodle can be configured in a variety of ways depending on your pedagogical goals. For example, you can configure a quiz to have no time limit, or the quiz can be timed such that students have a set number of minutes within which to complete it. These settings control a Quiz activity separately from the actual content of the quiz, i.e. configuring a quiz and adding questions to a quiz are two separate steps. For more information, see Add & Configure a Quiz Activity in Moodle.

Step 3

Add questions to a configured Quiz activity from the Question bank.

Once you have questions in your Question bank and you have a configured Quiz activity, you can edit the Quiz activity to select questions from your Question bank and arrange them in your quiz according to the way you want them to appear for students. The Editing quiz page also allows you to add section headings (sub-headings) within the quiz. For more, see Add or Edit Questions in a Moodle Quiz.

Step 4

Administer, review, and grade a Quiz activity.

The last step is to configure how you want Moodle to administer and score your quiz. Once you configure scoring, you can release a quiz simply by making it available (visible) to students, or you can control access to your quiz using a variety of methods, such as restricting the quiz to a particular Group of students. You can also configure the quiz settings to give certain students extended time, or re-open a closed quiz to allow particular students to retake it. Once students make attempts on the quiz, you can review their attempts and monitor their progress. Moodle will automatically score the majority of question-types in the Quiz activity, but you can also manually override the grade or change the grade calculation schema. For more, see Administer, Review, and Grade a Moodle Quiz.