Moodle Resources

Quiz Activity

Adding a quiz activity is comprised of two parts, creating the quiz and the Question bank.


Adding a Quiz

To add a quiz activity, you will need to first turn editing on. Add the quiz activity from the "Add an activity..." drop-down menu in the section where you would like the quiz to reside.

You will then see the following page:

The Timing section allows you to control when your quiz is available. By default, the open and close times are disabled so that means that your quiz will be active as soon as you save it. You can set a future date here for your quiz to open to prevent premature attempts.

The Display section has some items you'll wish to consider.


Questions per page - Allows you to split up your quiz into pages.
Shuffle questions - Shuffles the order in which your questions appear.
Shuffle within questions - Possible answers where available (multiple choice, matching, etc.) are shuffled, meaning that if two students are taking the test at the same time, the answer order they see will be different.
The Grades section allows you to choose in the "Grading method" drop-down menu "highest grade" by default, or the average, first, or last grade. If a quiz is run in Adaptive mode then a student is allowed to try again after a wrong response. In this case you may want to impose a penalty for each wrong response to be subtracted from the final mark for the question. The amount of penalty is chosen individually for each question when setting up or editing the question. You may also specify the precision in decimal places of the grade (0-3).


The Review options settings control whether and when students will be able to review their past attempts at this quiz.


The Security section adds some levels of security to the test. The Moodle documentation notes in boldface: "This security is NOT watertight." Some mouse and keyboard functions are limited and one may require a password to attempt the quiz. You may also specify a range of IP addresses in the 'Require network address' setting from which the quiz may be taken, limiting it to a specific computer lab, for example. (not sure if this applies to NCCSC - but if you want to limt the quiz to school only - let me know and I can check on that!)

Overall feedback is where you may enter text to be shown to students after they have completed an attempt at the quiz based on their score. You can add more fields for overall feedback if necessary.


Click the 'Save and display' button to complete the initial settings for a quiz:

The Question Bank

Now you will be taken to the Question Bank page. This is the location where you create quiz questions and add them to your quiz. At this point, your quiz does not contain any questions. Items created in the Question Bank remain editable and reusable, while quizzes become locked once they are attempted.

Adding a Question

Look for the Create new question drop-down menu and select 'Multiple Choice'.

Once you click 'Multiple Choice' you will now see the page that creates the new question.

The Category will be set to your course category. You may select another category if needed.

The Question name identifies the question for you in the Question bank. It does not appear in your quiz.

The Question text is where you enter your question. You can use the HTML Editor to add images or styled text.

Scroll down and continue with the question set up.

Format is set at HTML and may not be changed.

Image to display will display an image from the "Files" section of a course immediately below the question. You can select an image to display in the question with this setting.

The Default question grade sets the maximum number of grades for this question.

The Penalty factor is only applied if you have enabled 'Adaptive mode' in your quiz. If the penalty factor is more than 0, then the student will lose that proportion of the maximum grade upon each successive attempt. For example, if the default question grade is 10, and the penalty factor is 0.2, then each successive attempt after the first one will incur a penalty of 0.2 x 10 = 2 points.

You may wish to enter some General feedback for the question. Students will see the feedback after submitting their answer to the question. You can control when general feedback is shown to students using the "Review options" check-boxes on the quiz editing form.

The One or multiple answers? allows students to select multiple answers for the question.

If you check the Shuffle the choices? setting then the order of the answers is randomly shuffled each time a student starts an attempt at a quiz containing this question - provided that "Shuffle within questions" in the Quiz settings is set to "Yes".

Now you will be able to set your possible answers for the question.

Create your choices by entering an Answer. Choice blanks without an answer do not display in the question.

Be sure to set the Grade for the correct answer(s).

Using the Feedback section you may add comments for the student to see if they select this answer.

Scroll down and add incorrect answers.


Scroll down and enter more incorrect answers. If you need more than the default three choices, click the button labeled 'Blanks for Three More Choices'.

Scroll down and you will see the Overall Feedback section. This section is optional.


Enter feedback as needed or wished. Then click "Save changes" and your question will be saved into your Question Bank.


Now, you will return to the Question bank page and you will see your Multiple Choice question listed on the right side.

Note that your question has not been added to your quiz yet. To add the question to your quiz, click the icon next to your question. If you would like to see your question in a preview window, click the icon. The question will now be listed in the 'Questions for this quiz' area on the left side of the page.


Now you may add more questions to your quiz. The following types are available:

• Calculated - Calculated questions offer a way to create individual numerical questions by the use of wildcards (i.e {x} , {y}) that are substituted with random values when the quiz is taken.
• Description - This is not really a question type. It simply prints some text (and possibly graphics) without requiring an answer. This can be used to provide information to be used by a following group of questions, for example.
• Essay - The essay question type is intended for short answers of a paragraph or two, that one often finds on exams. For longer essays, Online text assignment or Upload a single file assignment are better choices.
• Matching - Matching questions have a content area and a list of names or statements which must be correctly matched against another list of names or statements.
• Embedded Answers (Cloze) - These questions consist of a passage of text (in Moodle format) that has various answers embedded within it, including multiple choice, short answers and numerical answers. Cloze questions are easily created using the Hot Potatoes software.
• Multiple Choice - You can create single-answer and multiple-answer questions, include pictures, sound or other media in the question and/or answer options (by inserting HTML) and weight individual answers.
• Short Answer - In a short answer question, the student types in a word or phrase in response to a question (that may include a image). Answers may or may not be case sensitive. The answer could be a word or a phrase, but it must match one of your acceptable answers exactly. It's a good idea to keep the required answer as short as possible to avoid missing a correct answer that's phrased differently.
• Numerical - From the student perspective, a numerical question looks just like a short-answer question. The difference is that numerical answers are allowed to have an accepted error. This allows a continuous range of answers to be set.
• Random Short-Answer Matching - From the student perspective, this looks just like a Matching question. The difference is that the sub-questions are drawn randomly from the Short Answer questions in the current question category.
• True/False - A student is given only two choices for an answer in this kind of question: True or False.

At the Question bank page, you can click the 'Preview' tab to see a preview version of your quiz.