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Adding Activities

8. Quiz

The Moodle quiz activity enables you to create quizzes comprising questions of various types, including multiple choice, matching, short-answer and numerical. A well thought out quiz is ideal for assessment in an open online course which does not have ongoing tutor or teacher support.

You can allow the quiz to be attempted multiple times, with the questions shuffled or randomly selected from the question bank. A time limit may be set.

Each attempt is marked automatically, except for essay questions which can only be marked manually, and the grade is recorded in the gradebook.

You can choose when and if hints, feedback and correct answers are shown to learners.

Quizzes may be used:

  • As course exams
  • As mini tests for reading assignments or at the end of a topic
  • As exam practice using questions from past exams
  • To deliver immediate feedback about performance
  • For self-assessment

When setting up a quiz for your open educational resource, you need to carefully construct all the variables for the question bank.

There are two courses on OpenLearn Create about setting up and configuring Moodle quizzes, written by the same people. These courses explore the different question types and various configuration issues. Although they are both a few years old now, they contain lots of useful information about Moodle quizzes.

eAssessment@OU eAssessment with Moodle (open.edu)

Hands–on Moodle Quiz (open.edu).

You can also find more information about configurating Moodle quizzes on Moodle.org at Quiz activity - MoodleDocs.

Please note: After a quiz is attempted, it is not possible to add or delete quiz questions, and it is only possible to make minor textual but not functional amendments to a quiz question after the quiz has been attempted. Therefore, it is far better to make sure the quiz questions are all correct and functioning properly before making the course and quiz available to learners.

Quizzes for rewards such as badges or certificates

The criteria of the quiz can be set to complete all the questions (regardless of whether a pass grade has been achieved) or to achieve a pass grade. If the completion of a quiz leads to a digital badge or a certificate, you can use formative and summative quizzes in different ways for the badge or certificate. For example, you might have a series of 3 quizzes which the learner needs to complete without a passing grade, followed by an end of course quiz which does require a pass grade. You can choose to make all four quizzes count for the digital badge or only have the digital badge based on the end of course quiz if you don’t want their learning journey to be included in the badge criteria. You could have a badge for each section of a course. 

Graded quizzes

When setting up the grading of quizzes (if a pass grade is required), you are advised to read the guidance on setting up activity and course completion tracking, badges and custom Moodle certificate or statement of participation.

Access to learner progress

You need to have the Course Manager or Teacher role to be able to see learner progress data for quizzes in OpenLearn Create, so will need to complete the Data Declaration form to get this role (please contact the OpenLearn create mailbox to request the form).