Quiz activity

How to create and use a Quiz activity

Terra van der Lugt avatar
Written by Terra van der Lugt
Updated over a week ago

The Quiz activity allows you to create a quiz to help your learners practice or to assess their understanding.

How to add a Quiz activity to your course

  1. Click + Add new on the bottom left of your course

  2. Under Activities, select Quiz

  3. On the Quiz activity page, edit the title and content to describe your content

  4. On the bottom of the page, click Create quiz to start editing your quiz


How to create a quiz

Question types

The Quiz activity supports the following question types:

  • Multiple choices with only one correct answer

  • Multiple choice with multiple correct answers

  • Open-ended questions

Writing a question

Each question has a rich-text editor where you can type your question. The rich-text editor includes bold, italics, underline, text colors, highlight text, hyperlinks, and bulleted and numbered lists. You can also insert an image or media file, insert a math equation in TeX format, or insert a code block.

Multiple choice questions: Writing the possible answers

The answers to your quiz use the same rich-text editor. The quiz editor default is two possible answers. You can add more possible answers by clicking “Add option”. You can add feedback text by clicking the Add help text button. Feedback text will only be visible after that answer is selected. In this way, you can use feedback text to explain why that answer is correct or incorrect, or simply add additional information about the chosen answer.

A quiz question asks "What color will you get if you mix blue and yellow paint?" There are two possible answers: Purple or Green

Multiple choice questions: Single select or multiple select?

If your question has one correct answer, choose Single select and mark your correct answer by clicking the check mark in front of the correct answer. If your question has multiple correct answers, choose Multiple select and select all of the possible correct answers by clicking the check mark. Multiple choice questions are required to have at least one correct answer.

Open-ended questions

Questions that are open-ended allow the learner to answer the question with text. Open-ended questions are not graded.

⚙️Question settings

  • Each question can be marked as optional or required.

  • You can turn on “Randomize answers” which will randomly mix the order of possible answers for a multiple choice question

  • You can duplicate questions or delete questions.

Organizing quiz questions

Questions are presented to the learner in order with one question visible at a time. You can see the question number in the circle on the top left of each question (i.e. “Q3" is Question 3). You can reorder and organize your questions using the drag and drop button on top. You can insert new questions between previously written questions with the "+ Add question" button.

The edits you make to your quiz will save automatically, and you can click the Back button on the top left to return to your Quiz activity page to set overall quiz settings.


💡Tip: Finish editing your quiz completely before inviting learners to take your quiz. After a learner submits answers, the quiz will automatically lock for editing.


The above quiz would look like this for learners:


Quiz activity settings

On the Quiz activity page, click on Settings to adjust the settings for your quiz.

Reveal correct and incorrect answers

You can determine how you’d like your learners to view their results after they complete a quiz.

  • Reveal the correct and incorrect answers to learner

  • Reveal only whether the chosen answers were correct or incorrect to learner

  • Reveal only the total number of correct and incorrect answers to learner once the quiz is completed

Retry quiz

You can decide if you want to allow learners to retake the quiz. If you allow retries, you can determine how many retries are allowed or allow an infinite amount of retries. If a learner retries a quiz, only their most recent submission will be saved, and any previous submissions will be overwritten.

Completion & Visibility settings

You can use completion and visibility settings to add specific rules for who can view and access this activity, including setting deadlines and prerequisites. You can see details about these rules here.


Completing a Quiz

What does it mean when a learner completes a Quiz?

A Quiz activity will be marked as "complete" with a green checkmark on the left side menu once the learner has submitted their answers to all required questions. The green checkmark does not indicate any information about the score on the quiz, and only shows that the learner has submitted the quiz at least once.


💡Tip: If you choose to use the Quiz activity as a prerequisite, this means that a learner only needs to submit answers in order to progress to the next activity, and does not mean that a learner needs to pass the quiz to move on.

If you want a learner to earn a specific score in order to progress to the next activity, you will need to set up a Scoring activity and use that as the prerequisite (instead of the Quiz activity).


Viewing quiz results

How can learners view their results of a Quiz?

Learners will see their quiz results after they’ve completed a quiz, depending on your selection in Quiz settings for revealing correct and incorrect answers. They can also click “Show quiz” to review their answers and the results for each individual question.

Note: Open-ended questions are not graded. The number of open-ended questions will appear in blue text and won't count towards correct or incorrect answers.

How can instructors view the results of a Quiz?

Instructors are able to review individual learner quiz results after at least one learner has submitted their quiz. On the Quiz activity page, the instructor can choose “View answers'' to see each learner’s results, question by question.

In order to view student quiz scores as a percent for all learners, instructors can go to the “Summary” tab on the top right of the page and click “Scores” with the column toggle on for the Quiz activity.

If retries are allowed, instructors can review the number of Quiz attempts in “Metadata”.


Quiz scores

Let learners view their quiz score

Instructors may want learners to review their quiz score as a percent and show if a learner passed or failed the quiz. You can add a Scoring activity to your course and choose the Input to be the quiz score. You can determine a threshold for a passing score, and learners will see their score as a percent and if they've passed or failed the quiz.

Use a quiz score as a prerequisite

Instructors may want to use a passing score on a quiz as a prerequisite to a different activity (for example, after learners pass a quiz, they could earn a certificate). Combining the Scoring activity with the Quiz activity allows you to create powerful automations within your course.


💡Tip: Remember to plan carefully - the quiz will lock for editing after the first learner submits their answers.


Consider testing your quiz before you invite real learners. Use the feature to preview your course with test learners to test your quiz from the learner point of view. Once you remove the test learner, the quiz will be open for editing again. After a learner submits answers to a quiz, the quiz editor will be locked for editing.

The quiz editor locks once a learner submits answers, but you can unlock the quiz editor by deleting any learner answers that have already been submitted. It is possible to make edits to a quiz that already has learner answers by either deleting all learner answers first or creating a duplicate activity.

Happy quizzing! 📝

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