The Moodle quiz tool can be used to set up exams that students complete remotely. You can create, for example, essay-type exams, automatically marked multiple-choice exams and exams with yes/no questions. You can create an extensive question bank, and the system will randomly assign a set of questions for each exam taker.
What do I need?
You need a course page in Moodle before you can create exams in Moodle. Go to Moodle.
What do I need to do?
There are multiple options for creating exams in Moodle. e.g.:
Essay-type exam in Moodle: Questions can be same for every student or you can create an exam where the essay questions are randomly assigned for each student from a question bank.
Multiple-choice exam in Moodle: Multiple-choice and other automatically assessed questions can be are randomly assigned for each student from a question bank and their answers are automatically marked.
When creating a Quiz you can either make the questions first to question bank on the course area and add them to the Quiz, or add a Quiz activity and create the questions as you go along.
Question bank
This feature allows a teacher to create, preview, and edit questions in a database of question categories. The questions in a category can be added to a Quiz that you add in course area. The teacher enters the question bank by creating or editing a quiz activity or via Course settings.
Quiz activity
- In a course, with the editing turned on, choose Quiz from the activity chooser.
- Give it a name and, if required, a description.
- Expand the other sections to select the settings you want. With the default settings, students can repeat the quiz, moving freely between questions, each on a different page. There is no time limit and scores and feedback display once they have completed the quiz.
- To change any of these defaults, and for more information on configuring your quiz, see Quiz settings
- Click Save and display.
- Click Edit quiz
- Click Add and then click ‘+ a new question’ (If you already made questions in the question bank, then click ‘+ from question bank’ or if you wish to add a question randomly picked from a category of questions, click ‘+ a random question’.)
What should I take into account?
Questions are created and stored separately in a Question bank and can be reused in different quizzes.
The quiz tool is not the only tool for demonstrating learning via Moodle. You can also collect student essays using the assignment tool (= only the teacher sees the essays) or the discussion forum (= students can see and comment on each other’s essays).
As the quiz tool puts quite a strain on Moodle, you should not create quizzes that dozens of students will take at the same time. The system may not be able to handle the extra strain as one cannot know what other activities are going on in Moodle at the same time. If you are planning to create an exam that a large number of students complete simultaneously, please use O365 Forms or email it-helpdesk@tuni.fi.
The quiz tool in Moodle is best suited for exams that students can complete within a specific time period (at least one week but preferably longer). Moodle is busiest on weekdays between 10 and 16. Could you schedule your exam to take place outside these hours?