Quiz: Automatic grading
If you want to assess learners formatively or summatively with questions for which there are
specified answers Moodle's very powerful Quiz enables you to do this. We can only look at a
few of the features of the Quiz in this screencast but it's worth exploring more yourself and in the
Moodle documentation. Quiz allows you to use different types of questions not just
multiple choice, and it also allows you to add, as here, media, images, video, sound files as part
of your questions. If we go to our course and see how to add a Quiz the first thing to note is that
from Course navigation, More, we can access the Question bank. When a Quiz is created in Moodle
you create the questions separately and store them separately so they can be reused by you in a later
Quiz or by your colleague in the same course in a different Quiz. So, if you wish, you could start
by adding your Quiz questions to this Question back here and then make a Quiz another day.
We can see some of the features of the Question bank in another course on another site here
As we and our colleagues create questions we can decide whether to keep as ready for use
or save them as draft for more discussion, or to make them ready for use. We can view
the history of questions, previewing each version, and add and view comments.
Question statistics are now easier to find and benefit from, and the usage column shows the
quizzes in which questions are used, and how many attempts have been made. Teachers can ask
admins to create helpful question custom fields which can also be viewed from the question bank.
But we’ll make our Quiz straight away so to do that we enable Edit mode and then in
the section we want the Quiz we click Add an activity or resource. This takes us to
Moodle's Activity chooser. Quiz is an activity because the learners are interacting with it.
Click once to go straight to the setup screen or click the
i for more information and then press the Add button bottom right.
The first thing that we do is create the front page, if you like, of the Quiz:
the name and the description which Quiz learners will see, and if you want the description to
appear on the course page just tick the box Display description on course page. There are
many different settings in a Quiz, and it is worth exploring all of them. If
there's anything you're not sure of, the ? help icon gives you extra information.
You can choose how you want learners to navigate through the Quiz,
if you want them to have hints, how much feedback if any you give them and more.
Activity completion. If we want to track that students have accessed the Quiz,
do we want them to manually click to confirm they have seen it, or do we want it automatically
marked complete when they have simply viewed it, got a grade or passing grade or other criteria?
To alert course participants that a Quiz activity has been added or updated,
click Send content change notification - but we are not going to do that yet
since we haven’t added any questions to our Quiz.
We click Save and display and we have a blank Quiz and what we need to do is to start adding
some questions which we can do by clicking Add question. And then the link Add. If we already
have questions we could add a random question to our Quiz or a particular question from
the question bank which we might have added to earlier or colleague might have added to earlier,
but we're starting anew from nothing, so let's click to add a new question.
We are then presented with a list of question types to choose from
and just like with the activity chooser if we click the button next to the question type
we are presented on the right with some information as to what that question type does
and note that although most of these questions are questions where you provide the answer,
it is possible by choosing Essay to have learners typing an essay which we would then manually have
to grade. Note also there is a Description question. This isn't a question type as such;
it's just a text editor into which we could add an explanation, some instructions images,
videos or sound. For the purposes of this Quiz I'm just going to add a multiple-choice question.
We are then sent to the setup screen for this particular question. We have to give it a name
although the name doesn't appear in the Quiz, but it's important because it's how it would be
recognized in the question bank in the future, particularly if we have a lot of questions
ourselves and perhaps shared with colleagues. In the question text, that is where we type the
actual question, and then when we scroll down what we see will depend on the question type
but we will always be able to add general feedback for any question and then in the
answers because it's multiple choice we have the first possible answer with the grade 'None'.
We add None if the question is wrong or a hundred percent if it's right,
however, there are, as you can see, options in between. We can give specific feedback for
each individual answer and if we want to do more than just write simple text we can use
the icons in the text editor so again we write our choices, choose the grade and we continue.
When we click Save Changes, we have our first Quiz question which we can preview by clicking
the magnifying glass icon. We then go on and continue adding questions to our Quiz.
Finally, looking at a Quiz that's already been made, it's easy to change the order of
the questions by dragging them up or down, and to add or remove page breaks by clicking on the icon.