Setting up a new Moodle quiz

You can do a lot with Moodle quizzes, and there are a lot of features and settings (= highly customizable but steep learning curve).

Here are the basic steps to set up a Moodle quiz (before adding questions).

  1. Go to your Moodle site.
  2. In the top-right corner, toggle on Edit mode:
  3. Scroll to the section where you want to add the Quiz and click +Add an activity or resource.
  4. Under Activities, click Quiz
  5. The easy settings: name it, give a description (optional), decide on opening date (optional) and closing date, and time limit (optional). I would leave the "When time expires" setting as the default.
  6. Next, under Grade, if you have a category established in your Moodle gradebook, you can select it. Then decide how many attempts students should receive. My advice: 1, else you will have a massive list of attempts, and sometimes a student may need to "mix" these attempts together. Even if you only give them 1 overall attempt, you can still give them multiple tries per problem. (There is a lot of nuance here... decide exactly how you want them to submit for feedback.)
  7. Next, for Layout I recommend choosing Never, all questions on one page, or however you want to display the questions. (Default is one question per page, which is annoying.) You have a lot of control over this... when making the quiz, you can manually insert and remove page breaks, so there's nothing permanent about this selection.
  8. The hard setting: Question behavior. This is all about what kind of attempts and feedback you want to have. Here are the most useful ones:
    • One attempt, no feedback (good for tests) : deferred feedback
    • One attempt with immediate feedback : immediate feedback
    • Multiple attempts with immediate feedback : interactive with multiple tries (you then specify the number of tries per problem when you create each problem)
    • Unlimited attempts per problem with immediate feedback : adaptive mode (no penalties)

    Remark, if you are stuck on a Moodle setting, click the ? symbol. You can click the More help link to be taken to a page of instructions.

  9. Another tough setting: Review options. The default settings based on your Question behavior are generally fine for HW. For a test, uncheck everything from the first three columns except "During the attempt... the attempt." This will prevent students from perusing the test and sharing their answers while the test is open.
  10. Next, Extra restrictions on attempts. You can ignore this unless you want to set a password, or use the Respondus Lockdown Browser.
  11. Save your quiz! You are now ready to add a question.

 

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