How to make an online quiz for students or employees

An online quiz saves hours of marking: simpoll counts the correct answers and the score for you, and each participant's results are available right away. But the way you write the questions decides what the quiz really tests: knowledge, or the ability to guess.

Questions

One question, one thing to check

Write down exactly what the person should know and ask about it directly. If a question tests two things at once, a wrong answer will not tell you which one is missing.

Plausible wrong options

Wrong answers should look reasonable to someone who does not know the topic: common mistakes, similar terms, close numbers. If one option is noticeably longer or more detailed than the rest, people will pick it on a hunch and get it right.

No trick questions

Double negatives (which of these is not incorrect?) and all of the above options test attention to wording, not knowledge. It is better to avoid them.

Several correct answers

A multiple choice question with two or three correct options is harder to guess than a question with a single answer. Say in the question that more than one answer may be correct.

How to build the quiz in simpoll

1. Create a survey of the Quiz type and add questions with options.
2. Mark the correct answers in each question.
3. In Settings, set the percentage of correct answers needed to pass, for example 70%.
4. If you want a different final message for different results, assign points and choose a final text that depends on answer weights. All of this is covered in Quizzes, correct answers and points.

The same conditions for everyone

• Shuffle the options: each question has a Shuffle options setting, and in Settings you can randomize the question order. That makes it harder for neighbors to help each other.
• Block retakes by cookie and IP address, so nobody can take the quiz again after looking up the answers.
• Survey password and lifetime: the quiz is open only to your group and only when you need it. See Survey settings.
• Ask for a name with a respondent name question if you need results by person: the report then shows straight away whose quiz it is.

Reviewing the results

Each participant's report shows every answer marked as correct, incorrect or correct but missed, together with the number of correct answers and the score. You can view those who passed and those who failed separately. More in How to view results.

Look at the questions themselves too: if almost everyone got a question wrong, the problem may be the wording or a wrongly marked answer rather than the participants. The final table is easy to export to Excel for a gradebook or report.