Set up a question category via add random question

Go to the quiz and click on ‘edit quiz’ in the quiz administration menu.

The Editing quiz screen will appear. This is where the questions will appear, the maximum grade and the total of marks.

Click on the ‘add’ option to add a question.

The following choices will appear:

• a new question
• from question bank
• a random question

Select ‘a random question’.

The ‘add a random question’ screen will appear. The screen has two tabs: Existing category and New category.

Click on ‘new category’ tab then create a new category for the question.

Give the question a name and choose the parent category from the dropdown box:

Then click on ‘create category and add random question’ button. 

In the list of questions in the quiz you will now see ‘Random (Questio…’ in the list.

Click on the ‘see questions’ link for that question to add variant questions to that question.

The question bank screen will appear, the category already selected as the category you have just created.

Click on ‘create a new question’ button.

The ‘question types’ screen will appear.

Choose a question type to add (unless your course will be supported by a teacher manually marking quizzes, please do not choose ‘essay type’ as this cannot be automatically marked by the computer).

For example, ‘OU multiple response’ question type. Click on ‘Add’ button and the editing question screen will appear. Give the question a name (e.g. Q01a).

Add the question text into the box. The general feedback box is for feedback the learner sees after the question has been completed:

Further down the screen add the answer choices and any individual feedback about each answer (if provided). Don’t forget to check the boxes for each answer choice which is correct (this question type accommodates more than one correct choice or could be used for only one correct choice):

It usually isn’t necessary to make any changes to the default messages in the combined feedback boxes. By default, the combined feedback boxes contain the following messages:

• For any correct response: Your answer is correct
• For any partially correct response: Your answer is partially correct
• For any incorrect response: Your answer is incorrect

The multiple tries section is where you provide the hint text to give learners another try or tries at the question, if you leave the boxes empty they will only get the one try:

The hint could be as simple as ‘you may try again’ / ‘you have one more try’ to something which provides additional information or points to the section of the lecture where the topic was being covered. You can also apply a penalty for each incorrect try. If you are offering a total of 3 tries (first try, then hint 1, then hint 2) then the penalty for each incorrect try is 33.33% (you can change this via the dropdown).

Please note, if your question only has 3 choices of possible answer, please do not give more than one hint otherwise the learner will be able, by process of elimination, to get the answer right on the third try.

Save the changes to your variant question.

The variant question will now appear in the question bank for Question 1.

Add further variant questions to Question 1 in the same way. They could be the same question but with a different selection of answer choices (including different plausible distractors) or could be a different question (and question type) about the same topic.

Set the total grade for the quiz and the pass grade

Once you have set up all the questions in your quiz and have decided how many marks each question is worth (you can edit this in the question itself or in the Editing quiz screen) you can set the total grade for the quiz.

The system will default to listing the total of the marks that all the questions in the quizzes add up to and will place the same figure in the total grade for the quiz box. However, it can be changed to show a Maximum grade of 10.00 or 100.00 rather than a number which might not be so easily divided by 10 or 100 as it makes it easier for learners to understand the percentage score awarded for their attempt. 

Below is an example of what the learner sees about their marks for a quiz which does not have a pass grade. In this example, the Maximum grade has been set as 10.00, the total of marks is 6.00 and the system does the maths to calculate the percentage.

Marks 4.50/6.00

Grade 7.50 out of 10.00 (75%)

If the quiz has a pass grade, making the Maximum grade 10 or 100 makes it much easier to calculate and enter the pass grade figure into the quiz settings, where you change the Grade to pass from 0.00 to 5.00 for a 50% pass boundary if the quiz has a total grade of 10.00.