The Quiz tool (Moodle icon = 
)
The Quiz tool is used to make on-line tests, which can consist of various question types. These quizzes can either be available as assignments (i.e. you can decide yourself when and how you do them and sometimes you can take the quiz more than once), or they can be made available only during a monitored in-class exam.
The Moodle quiz tool has 6 different question types that mostly speak for themselves:
The different question types are shown below (and below them is information about saving and submitting a quiz that you must read!):
Multiple Choice
Multiple choice questions are used to test knowledge of facts and rules. The standard question has a question and three or four answers from which you must choose the most correct one, so you must read both the question and the answers carefully.
Some MC questions require you to select two or more correct answers, selecting fewer will result in loss of points (i.e. you get either only partial points or no points at all for the question)!
The True-False question looks just like a multiple choice question (see picture above) except that it has only two answer alternatives (True or False, Correct or Incorrect, Yes or No, etc.). True-False questions are used sparingly to introduce subjects.
Matching questions test your knowledge of a subject by making you combine related elements from two lists. Matching questions are often used as a warm up at the beginning of a quiz. They can come in combination with pictures, for example, an anatomical picture with numbered organs, the names of which must be selected from the drop down menu.
Short answer questions are used for testing your knowledge of terminology/vocabulary and proper spelling. They are therefore most common in language courses.
Where a short answer question can have alphanumerical answers, a calculated question needs a numerical answer. In contrast with the short answer question which has a limited number of fixed corrrect answers, a calculated question can have an error margin. For example, if the correct answer to a question is 20 the teacher can set an acceptable error margin of 10 percent, meaning that all answers between 18 and 22 are accepted as correct.
Gap filling questions are in concept meant to create so-called cloze texts (like in the above example) in which you must fill in the missing words, which can be given in an accompanying text, a word list or as above in a sound file.
This question type kind of combines the options of the above question types and therefore can be used in many different ways.
Essay questions require you to write longer pieces of text. Copy and pasting text from other applications is discouraged (pasted text may not save properly) and will in many cases also be disallowed, or downright illegal! Quizzes containing essay questions normally have several pages.
Unlike the other question types, essay questions are not autograded by the quiz tool. Thus, for quizzes containing essay questions, you will only get your quiz result after the teacher(s) have checked and graded your work.
A corrected essay question looks like this:
In most quizzes the questions and answers will be shuffled for each student and it is also possible that questions are randomly taken from a database, so that no one will have exactly the same quiz. These features can come combined with a floating timer that limits your access to the quiz, as well as with password unlocking:
At the end of your quiz you'll find two buttons. One, Save without submitting, is meant as a safety feature to save your answers from time to time, while you are working on the quiz. If something happens, like a power failure or something, your answers remain saved. The second button, Submit all and finish, is to submit the quiz when you have answered all the questions (If you omit to submit a quiz before the availability runs out, your answers will be saved but your grade will be zero!):
Note that when you click either button you must give the quiz page time to save and reload before moving to another page! This can take some time depending on the the size of the quiz page, the number of essay questions and the speed of your connection. So, before moving to another page, make sure the quiz page has reloaded entirely and the timer (if any) has reappeared!
In a homework-type quiz, without a timer, you can use the Save without submitting button to save your answers and close the quiz, so as to return to it at a later time to continue your attempt.
Once you have submitted and finished a quiz, you are shown a result page like this:
Depending on the settings made by the teacher, you will be able to review the quiz and see feedback and/or correct answers displayed (sometimes you need to move your mouse over the answer to see the feedback). For quizzes that you can take multiple times, you will normally not be able to see the correct answers until after the deadline has passed. Do check the feedback. It is automatically given. Learning from your mistakes is one of the most efficient ways of learning .
The result of the quiz will be displayed on your Grades page.
