Moodle Quiz Recipes

Moodle quizzes are flexible tools, but sometimes you have to bend the pieces to make them fit. There are lots of approaches for arranging quizzes, so I thought I would quickly cover some common ones to give you a starting point if you’re trying some of these styles yourself.

Splitting Multiple Choice and Short Answer/Essay Timing

Let’s say that you have a test with a multiple choice section and a written section. You want students to be able to jump between questions in a section, but worry that students who are fast on the written component will have too much time to go back to the multiple choice questions and Google answers or some other concern.

The easiest way to make sure that the multiple choice and written portion are getting an independent time is to break them apart and set up two quizzes, one for each section. This way you can set the two timings to better reflect your expectations.

A Later Section that Reveals Answers of an Earlier Section

If you have a quiz sectioned up but you have a later section that would reveal answers that you’re testing in an earlier section. If you’re fine with student’s having to go through questions without being able to go back you can set the Quiz Layout to Sequential in the navigation settings. You’ll need to make sure students are aware of that setting since the default is being able to go back and forth.

If you do want students to go back and forth you can still accomplish that breaking up of sections by splitting the quiz into two quizzes. On the first section go into the quiz settings and open the Activity Completion settings. Set activity completion to mark complete when certain conditions are met and check the box for “requires grade”.

On the latter section, go into quiz settings for that part and head to the Restrict Access section. Add a restriction for Activity Completion and choose the first quiz section on the activity chooser.

This will let students navigate through the questions as they like inside the sections, but lock the first section when they access the second.

You could think about this as having two quiz booklets where students have to hand in the first before receiving the second.

Giving Students Choice of Short Answer/Essay Questions

It’s pretty common to give students a choice of a series of questions. The only issue in Moodle is that each question has a maximum grade attached to it. If you want to have students answer 3 questions out of a list of 5, I set this up by setting up by writing all your questions as a description style question (no mark attached). Then I do a series of essay questions where the question text reads “Please indicate and answer your first question” and so on for your number of questions.

This way you don’t have to float marks or penalize students because Moodle’s maximum grade is different than the marks the student can actually achieve.

Giving Students Choice of A Random Pool of Short Answer/Essay Questions

This is one step more complicated than our last example. Here, instead of using a description question where all choices are listed, I make multiple versions of the “Please indicate and answer your first question”. With that first question I’ll add instructions and the questions to the first option before posting “Please indicate and answer your first question”. The questions for the second and third questions are the same as before.

With my multiple first questions and then 1 essay question for each additional chosen question all in a single category, I will get Moodle to add 1 random question, then add questions from the question bank.

It should look something like this:

So these are my quick quiz recipes. If you don’t see yours reflected, reach out and let us know what you need!