Adding Quizzes to Moodle Course
In most courses, a quiz or test is a major activity. In Moodle, creating, taking, and grading quizzes can be much faster. This means that you can use quizzes liberally throughout your courses.
Why Quizzes
- You can use a short quiz after each reading assignment to ensure that the students complete the reading. You can shuffle the questions and answers to prevent sharing among the students. You can also make the quiz available only for the week or month in which the students are supposed to complete the reading.
- You can use a quiz as a practice test. You can allow several attempts or use the adaptive mode to allow students to attempt a question until they get it right. Then, the quiz functions as both a practice and learning material.
- You can use a quiz as a pretest. You can ask the students to complete a quiz even before they come to the course. The students can complete this pretest at a time and place that is convenient for them. Then, you can compare their scores on the pretest and final test to show that learning has occurred.
Question Bank
The question bank is Moodle's collection of questions, which can be used within a quiz. In a quiz, you just choose questions from the question bank and display them all together. A quiz can be deleted from a course, but the questions remain in the question bank.
The questions in the question bank can be categorized and shared. The real asset in your learning site is not the quizzes, but the question bank that you can build over time.
How To Add Quiz
When you first create a quiz, you need to go to the Settings page. The settings that you select affect only that particular quiz. After the settings are chosen, you add questions to the quiz. The questions are the content of the quiz.
In Moodle, you can think of a quiz as a combination of the settings (display and behavior), the container (the quiz pages), and the questions (content).
Quiz Settings
General Settings
The General settings include the name and description for the quiz. Description is displayed when a student selects the quiz. You can also display Description on the course's home page. If you do this, it will continue to display when the student selects the quiz.
Timing
The Open and Close dates determine when the quiz is available. By default, a quiz does not have a time limit. If you want to set a time limit, use the Time Limit setting.
When time runs out, the quiz is automatically submitted with the answers that have been filled out. A time limit can help prevent the use of reference materials while taking the quiz. When students are taking a timed quiz, they see a countdown timer on the quiz page.
Grade
If you created categories in the courses' grade books, then you can assign this quiz to one of the categories using the Grade category setting. If you allow several attempts, the Grading method option determines which grade is recorded in the course's grade book: Highest, Average, First, or Last. If you do not allow multiple attempts, then Grading method would have no effect.
Layout
The settings under Layout control the order of questions on the quiz and the number of questions that appear on a page.
Question behaviour
The Shuffle within questions setting enables you to present the parts of a question in a random order. This only works if three conditions are true. First, this setting must be set to Yes. Second, the question must have several parts, such as a multiple choice or matching question. This setting has no effect on a fill-in-the-blank question. Third, each question also has a shuffle setting of its own. For any question, the shuffle setting must also be set to Yes.
The settings for How questions behave determines how the quiz will present the questions to the student.
Review options
Review options determine what information a student can see when they review a quiz. These options also determine when they can see this information.
Appearance
The settings under Display affect information that is displayed while the student is taking the quiz.
If Show the user's picture is set to Yes, then while the student is taking the quiz, the student's picture and name will be displayed in the quiz window. The settings for Decimal places in grades and Decimal places in question grades affect the display of grades that are shown to the student.
Extra restrictions on attempts
If you enter anything into Require password field, the student must enter that password to access the quiz. With Require network address, you can restrict access to the quiz to particular IP addresses. The Enforced delay settings prevent students from attempting the quiz without waiting between attempts. If Browser security is set to Full-screen pop-up, it launches the quiz in a new browser window. It uses JavaScript to disable copying, saving, and printing.
Overall feedback
Moodle enables you to create several different kinds of feedback for a quiz:
- You can create feedback for the entire quiz, which changes with the student's score. This is called Overall feedback and uses a feature called Grade boundary.
- You can create feedback for a question, no matter what the student's score on that question is. All students receive the same feedback. This is called General feedback.
- You can create feedback for a response. This is the feedback that the student receives when they select that response to a question.