Moodle III Quizzes and Gradebook

Online quizzes can be used to reiterate complex ideas in the reading, as a web-quest to make certain that online students read your syllabus, as open-book quizzes, to give student feedback, or simply as practice or study questions. Because Moodle grades the quizzes and deposits those grades in a gradebook, it becomes practical to offer more frequent quizzes or practice tests than in the traditional classroom.

There are three steps to creating a quiz.

1. Create the quiz title and accessibility settings.
2. Create questions, organized into categories.
3. Put the questions into the quizzes and assign points.

I. Create Quiz and Adjust Settings

1. From the homepage, click Turn Editing On.

2. Click on the dropdown menu, Add an Activity and choose Quiz.

3. Fill out the form with a descriptive title. Also put in an introduction for the quiz, including any special instructions you might have.

4. Select the date and times for the quiz to make it accessible by the students.

5. Choose among various options, clicking on the question marks to help you understand the choices. Then click Continue or Save Changes.

 

II. Create Questions

1. First create a Category to store your questions in the database. Click on Edit Category.

2. Type in the name of the category and any additional information in the Category Info field. Publish means to allow all instructors on the server (all OU faculty) to see and view your questions. Usually you do not want to do this, so leave the Publish dropdown menu at No. Then click Add.

3. Choose a type of new question from the drop down menu called Create New Question. This will take you to the question form.

4. Fill out a question name or title that will make sense to you when viewing it in a list. Type in your question and some answers. The correct answer will need to have the drop down Grade chosen, which will normally be 100%, if only one answer gets full credit. Also fill out feedback, if you want the student to have some additional information after they pick a right or wrong answer.

 

5. Click on Save Changes. If you want to change these settings later, click on Update this Quiz from the Edit Quiz screen.

6. Creating questions on one form at a time is quite slow. A faster way to create quiz questions is to type all the questions in a txt file and import them all at once. On the Edit Quiz screen, click on Import Questions from a File. Choose a file format. Click on the question mark to see the various types. Choose and follow exactly one of the format types as you are creating your text file of questions. Then Browse your computer for the question file and Upload this File.

III. Put Questions into Quiz and Assign Points

1. Return to the Edit Quiz screen. Check the boxes next to the question names or choose Select All.

2. Choose Add to Quiz and the questions will move to the left, so that you know they are now included in the quiz.

3. Reorder the questions if you'd like with the up/down arrows to the left of the questions. Change the points in the grading boxes if you want them to be worth more than one point and then click Save Grades.

 

IV. Reset Quiz

Often students will need a quiz reset if their technology fails and there is only one attempt allowed, you will need to go in and delete that individual botched attempt, so only that particular student may try again.

V. Gradebook

Adjusting Settings

• View Grades--The normal way to see grades.
• Edit Grades--Opens the grade columns to editable cells.
• Set Preferences

  • Simple--A simple gradebook has four tabs at the top and doesn't allow you to group assignments into categories or give grade exceptions.
  • Advanced--If you want to group grades into categories and the ability to specify grade exceptions, weights, and grade display, click on Use Advanced Features and choose your display options.

  
• Set Categories--You may choose whether to group grades into categories or not. Grouping by category puts a number of graded assignments into one folder called a category that you can then view and weigh separately from all other grades. You also have the ability to curve grades here or set extra credit.
• Set Weights--Set the relative weight of each category here.

• Set Grade Letters--Put in the absolute numerical equivalent for each letter grade.
• Grade Exceptions--Exclude certain students from individual assignments.
• Manage Graded Events --Add other columns to your gradebook.