Top 5 Ways for Teachers to Make a Quiz

Quizzes and tests are designed to evaluate students’ progress, but another function of such tools is teaching, not just measurement. Every instructor faces this kind of problem – the necessity to create an individualized system of examination which provides the instructor with verifiable data. Out-of-the-box solutions are not sufficient, as they can’t foresee all the possible nuances of a course. If a teacher doesn’t follow a standard curriculum, he or she needs personalized quizzes and other assessment tools.

1. Fundamental solutions

To make your own quiz, you can learn a programming language and code all the functions you need. The advantages are scanty, and the disadvantages are numerous. First of all, it takes a lot of time. To program even the simplest test from scratch, you’ll have to spend several weeks – or even months – studying HTML, JavaScript, Python, Delphi, and PHP, and mastering MS Office. It is possible to find a free HTML quiz code on the Internet, but the selection is poor, and without a proper knowledge of the source code, it’s difficult to discern a good choice from a bad one. Managing pictures, animations, branching scenarios, custom feedback, etc., takes even more time to master. Alternatively, you can hire a professional programmer, which involves a monetary investment.

The coding process is a very tiresome business, especially for a novice, and it’s even more difficult to write the proper code to share your test on multiple platforms and collect feedback via email or server.

2. PowerPoint

PowerPoint is designed to create presentations; it’s not quiz making software. Nevertheless, it can still be used to create simple evaluations. First, you’ll have to create some slides for the questions and possible answers, as well as feedback slides for correct and incorrect choices. Then you should insert hyperlinks to connect the choices to their results. To see how it works, please read this article.

PowerPoint is a great tool for creating branching scenarios that don’t require any tracking of results on the teacher’s end. You can use PowerPoint to make a personality quiz, a “choose your own adventure” game, or other entertainment-oriented material. Designing a more complex test in PowerPoint with interactive elements or tracking capabilities requires using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros. This again requires knowledge of programming concepts to implement – the deeper the functionality, the deeper your knowledge of programming must be.

3. Quiz Maker tool for teachers

Teachers are busy people and they usually don’t have a lot of free time to play around with complicated programs and technologies. In addition, professors need immediate feedback, a reliable assessment system, and an attractive and user-friendly interface. One of the main purposes of quizzing students is not only to evaluate their knowledge, but also to engage and entertain them, and make them eager to learn.

An advanced Quiz Maker for teachers offers various features to meet any learning goals and ambitions:

• Custom feedback for each question provides students with important information and encourages them to go on.
• Multiple attempts give users credit for learning from their mistakes.
• Info slides provide even more detailed information, and can assist students if they answered incorrectly.
• Branching scenarios allow you to create custom learning paths within a quiz.

With the help of an advanced Quiz Maker, a tutor can:

• Select one of the most popular graded question types, including multiple choice, multiple response, type in, etc.
• Make a quiz with pictures, photos, schemes, graphs, video and other visual effects.
• Use branching, apply penalties for incorrect answers, and set a time limit.
• Receive feedback via a convenient email results form or through an LMS.
• Save a quiz to Word format in order to print out a paper copy.

We’ve tried to make the same quiz using PowerPoint and iSpring QuizMaker. Take a look at the results of this interesting PowerPoint vs iSpring QuizMaker battle.

Example quiz created with iSpring QuizMaker

You are welcome to try out the advanced quiz-authoring tool from iSpring. Enjoy all the above mentioned features to create engaging and effective online quizzes. The trial period lasts for 14 days, so you will be able to test it to the fullest.

4. Online services

An Internet search reveals a wide selection of online quiz creators. Most of them are available without email registration, and offer simple functionality to make an educational quiz game in a few minutes. Animated and interactive quizzes can be used for e-Learning, marketing/promotional campaigns, monetizing free content, etc.

A common problem with simplicity is the lack of advanced options. You’ll often find with these sorts of tools that you can’t set up branching scenarios, create visual effects, upload images and video, etc. Such resources usually have only one type of question, and the instructor has no other options. If you want to measure your students’ knowledge deeper, you need different kinds of surveys: open and closed ones, with drop-down menus and blank fields. Online resources often don’t meet such demands.

5. LMS modules

Many LMSs provide functionality to create assessments. For example, in Moodle you have to follow several steps:

1. Create a question bank.
2. Add a quiz activity.
3. Add questions to the quiz.
4. Preview the quiz.

Filling in the gaps and selecting the appropriate alternatives in pop-down menus is easy, but the Moodle interface is not user-friendly and sorting out all the functions and choices may be tiresome. For help, check out this video or this video. These tutorials are very detailed and will help you create a quiz online if you already use Moodle LMS.

The disadvantage of this approach is that a test you create won’t be interoperable, so you can’t download it and upload to another LMS or take it on a computer.