Quiz: Setting up a Course Question Bank (Randomised/Variation Quizzes)

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Last updated: Apr 17, 2020
5 min read

This guide details the steps of how to set up a Question Bank that can be used to populate quizzes in a Moodle course. It will outline the steps to create question categories as well as creating questions.

Question Banks are useful for creating variations or randomised quizzes for each student, so that each student within the course accesses a “different” version of the quiz.

This guide will use the SIMPLIFIED example below to illustrate the reasoning behind certain settings. The actual quantity of questions to be used in a quiz is up to your (the lecturer’s) discretion.

Example: You want to provide students with a 15 question mid-term quiz:

  • 5 multiple choice,

  • 5 true/false and,

  • 5 short essay questions.

Use the Question Bank to create about 30 questions in total and have Moodle populate the quiz with 15 randomly selected questions. You might want to consider creating:

  • 10 multiple choice,

  • 10 true/false and,

  • 10 short essay questions.

 

Setting up Question Bank Categories

Based on the example above we will create a general category in the course titled Mid-term questions. Within that category we will create sub-categories for each different question type (multiple choice, true/false, essay).

The reason for separating the question types into different categories is so that you can specifically request how many of each type can be pulled into the quiz. If all questions were stored together and you want 15 questions in the quiz then you could end up just 10 multiple choice questions and 5 true/false questions being presented to students.

To get started setting up your Question Bank follow these steps:

  1. Visit the UNIC Moodle site (https://courses.unic.ac.cy/) and log in to your account.

  2. Open the course you want to create a Question bank for. Click the settings gear located at the upper-right corner of the course page and click More…. This will open the Course administration page.

     

  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and to the right of Question bank click Categories. The Edit categories page will load which displays all the Question Bank categories available to this specific course.

  4. To create a category in the course for this specific quiz (i.e. Mid-term in this example), scroll to the bottom of the page and under Add category enter a Name for the category:

     

  5. Nothing is required for the Category info field. Click the Add category button.
    You will see that your new category is now available in the course:


    If you intend to only use one question type in your randomised quiz, skip the remaining steps in this section.

     

  6. To add the sub-category for each question type repeat this step for each question type.
    Scroll to the bottom of the page and under Add category enter change the Parent category and select the category created for the quiz. Then enter a Name for the category:

     

  7. Once all categories are set up you will see them listed together.

     

Adding Questions to a Question Bank

Once you have your Question Bank set up you can start adding questions to it:

  1. Visit the UNIC Moodle site (https://courses.unic.ac.cy/) and log in to your account.

  2. Open the course you want to create a Question bank for. Click the settings gear located at the upper-right corner of the course page and click More…. This will open the Course administration page.

  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and to the right of Question bank click Questions. The Question bank page will load which displays all the questions in the currently selected Question Bank.

  4. Select the category that you want to add questions to from the Select a category dropdown menu and let the page reload.

     

  5. To add a question click Create a new question. You will be presented with the Choose a question to add dialogue. This lists all the possible question types you can add to the Question Bank. Select the type of question to be added then click Add. This will take you to the question editor.

    Please review this guide for the complete overview of each question type and their related settings: Quiz: Question Types & Settings

  6. Once you have added all your questions to the Question Bank, you can set up the Quiz in the course. Full instructions for this can be found here:

Adding Random Questions to your Quiz

  1. Visit the UNIC Moodle site (https://courses.unic.ac.cy/) and log in to your account. Access the course and the specific Quiz you want to add questions to.

  2. Once opened, click the gear icon on the upper-right and select Edit quiz. This will take you to the page to allow you to add questions.

     

  3. On the right of the page click the Add button. This will provide you with 3 options:

    1. a new question: create a new question directly in the quiz

    2. from question bank: add a specific question or questions form the course question bank

    3. a random question: add a random question or questions form the course question bank


    Click a random question.

  4. You will be presented with the Add a random question dialogue. Select the Category that you want to import questions from and the Number of random questions. Click Add random question when done.

     

  5. Your random questions will be added to the course. Repeat the previous step until you have added the required number of random question of each question type.

 

Your Quiz is now ready for your students!