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Relevant to: faculty and staff
This article contains information considered accurate at the time of publishing. Technology updates, changes in University security practices, policies and procedures may effect the information in this article - updates to articles are scheduled on a periodic basis and will address any required changes.
Introduction
Quizzes are one way to assess your students' learning. This article explains how to create a quiz and adjust the settings.
Quiz Basics
Quizzes are highly flexible, offering you a choice of 11 types of questions:
- True/False
- Multiple choice
- Multiple select
- Written response
- Short answer
- Multiple short answer
- Fill in the blanks
- Matching
- Ordering
- Arithmetic
- Significant figures
You can create the questions when you set up a quiz, or create them in advance in the Question Library and then import them into a quiz. The Question Library can be useful if you think you might re-use questions. You can also import questions into a quiz using a .csv file.
You can easily control the order of questions using a simple click-and-drag interface, or even set the questions to be shuffled randomly.
In the Gradebook, quizzes are always graded numerically.
Create a Quiz
- From the course landing page, on the navbar, select Course Menu.
- In the drop-down menu that appears, select Quizzes.
- The Manage Quizzes page appears, showing a list of all existing quizzes.
- Select the New Quiz button.
- In the Quiz Title field enter a name for the quiz.
- Under the heading Questions, you have the option of creating questions directly or importing them from a .CSV file or from the Question Library. This article covers creating questions directly.
- Select the Create New button. The menu that appears allows developers to create a New Question, Section, or Question Pool.
- In the menu that appears, select New Question. A second menu will appear of all the question types available. Select the type of question you want.
- The question page will appear with fields appropriate to the type of question. Fill out the fields as needed, including the points value to be assigned. For some question types, you will see an Options menu in the upper right of the page. Click on the chevron to see additional settings and select them as needed.
- At the bottom of the page, the Save button has three options:
- Select Save and New to save your current question and go on to create a new one.
- Select Save and Copy to save your current question and create a copy of it to edit as needed.
- Select Save to finish your quiz and see a complete list of your questions.
- Once you select Save, the question(s) that were created will appear under the Questions header. From here, you can do the following:
- Select a question to edit it.
- Add questions by selecting the Add Existing or Create New buttons.
- Reorder the questions as follows:
- Hover over the question you want to move. On the far left, a "handle" icon that looks like a grid, will appear.
- Select the "handle" icon and drag the question to its new place in the sequence.
- Preview the quiz by selecting the Preview link in the upper right.
- Once you are finished adding questions, settings can be found in the four menu options found on the right side of the screen. Select the desired options for the quiz to finalize the creation of the quiz.
Adjust Quiz Settings
Your quiz has many optional settings which you can adjust to meet your needs. Some settings are found in the main. portion of the screen. These options include the following:
- Quiz Title: Enter the name of the quiz.
- Grade Out Of: In this section, you can:
- Enter the points possible on this quiz (this number will update to match the total based on the questions when they are added to the quiz.
- Association to the gradebook.
- Due Date: Set the date this quiz is due; this will display in the course calendar.
- Description: Enter a description of the quiz. Set the description to "On" to make it visible to students.
- Quiz Questions: In this section, you can:
- Set the number of questions per page. By default, the entire quiz appears on one page.
- Shuffle the questions.
- Select the "Add/Edit Questions" button to open the "Question Editor" page where you can add questions, edit existing ones, reorder them and preview the quiz.
- Select the "Edit Values" button to edit the points value of the questions.
- Select a question to preview how it will appear to students (opens in a separate window).
- Hide from users: When you first create a quiz, it is hidden from users by default. To make it visible, deselect Hide from Users.
Additional settings are organized under five tabs found on the right side of the screen:
- Availability Dates & Conditions: Settings that control when students have access to the quiz and for how long.
- Timing & Display: Settings that allow developers how much time students have to complete the quiz, how questions are shuffled, and display features and options.
- Attempts & Completion: Settings that control the number of attempts students have when completing the quiz, how any additional attempts are displayed to students, rules for retaking the quiz, how the quiz is organized on the Quizzes page, and email notification options.
- Evaluation & Feedback: Settings that control how the quiz is associated with the grade book, how the student receives feedback, when the quiz is considered completed, overall grade calculation, and associations with Learning Objectives.
Once you finish adjusting the settings, select the Save and Close button to save your changes and close the quiz.
Availability Dates & Conditions
- Availability: Set a start and end date for the quiz to be available. Select Display in Calendar to include the dates in the course calendar.
- Release Conditions: Set release conditions, such as submission of an assignment or completion of content topics.
- Optional Advanced Restrictions: Protect the quiz with a password or restrict it to users coming from defined IP addresses.
- Special Access: Set special access permissions.
Timing & Display
- Timing: Set a recommended or enforced time limit.
- Paging: Set how many questions appear on each page.
- Shuffle Quiz: Set whether or not the quiz shuffles the order questions are displayed.
- Display: In this section, you can:
- Allow hints
- Disable email, instant messages, and alerts while the quiz is in progress
- Header and Footer: Set what displays in the header and footer of each page.
Attempts & Completion
- Attempts: Set the number of attempts allowed, retake conditions, and overall grade.
- Category: Set the category this quiz is organized into on the Quizzes page.
- Notification Email: Set an email address to have Brightspace email when a quiz attempt has been completed.
- Completion Tracking: Set what criteria need to be met for the quiz to be considered to be complete.
- Grade Item: Associate the quiz with an item in the grade book.
Evaluation & Feedback
- Auto publish attempt results immediately upon completion: Select the checkbox to automatically publish attempt results when a student completes the quiz.
- Synchronize to Grade Book: Select the checkbox to automatically update evaluations in the grade book.
- When published, display to learners: In this section, you can:
- Display the attempt grade.
- Options for what questions, if any, students can see upon completion of their attempt.
- Customize Quiz Results Displays.
- Learning Objectives: Select Manage Learning Objectives to connect the quiz to a learning objective.
Common Brightspace Quiz Question Options
All Brightspace questions have a box under Points so you can adjust point value. For many Brightspace quiz question types, including multiple choice, true/false, short answer, multi-select, and written response, the following settings can be accessed by going to th Options dropdown menu at the top right of the screen.
Common Options
- Add Feedback: For objective question types such as multiple choice and true/false, you can add feedback to both the correct and incorrect answer choices explaining why a certain one was correct and why the other choices were incorrect. For subjective questions such as written response, you can give a student direct feedback on the quality of their response.
- Add Hint: This allows you to provide students some extra clarification about a question or additional guidance towards a particular answer.
- Add Short Description: This allows you to add a brief written summary of the question.
Specific Brightspace Quiz Question Options
Certain Brightspace question types have unique options available to them. Unless otherwise noted, they can be accessed by going to the Options dropdown menu at the top right of the screen.
Specific Options
- Add Enumeration: For multiple choice, true/false, and multi-select questions, this will allow you to add letters, numbers, or roman numerals to your answer choices. Note: if you use an answer choice such as "all of the above" or "choice A only," do not choose to randomize your answer order, as "choice A" will be different for some students.
- Randomize Answer Order: for multiple choice and multi-select questions, you can click the randomize answer order box under Add Answer to cause the answer choices to shuffle differently for each student. Note: matching questions automatically randomize question and answer order.
- Add Answer Key: For written response questions, you can add a description of what a correct response should look like in case another person will be evaluating the students' responses.
- Enable HTML Editor for Learner Responses: For written response questions, this can allow students different formatting options such as font type, paragraph alignment, and the ability to insert items into their responses.
- Allow learners to insert images and add attachments: Students can attach files or other items to their written response questions.