Quizzes in a traditional learning setting are important. They are a standard part of testing a student’s knowledge of the subject.
But now, let’s shift to an online learning environment.
Suddenly, you don’t have eyes on how diligently a student studies. Nor can they ask you for clarifications in the middle of the lesson.
Here, a quiz becomes crucial.
It helps you understand how much students have actually retained from the material. And what areas they might have trouble with.
And LearnDash understands this. The LMS offers a vast variety of quiz options. So you build quizzes that work for your students. In this article, we navigate important LearnDash quiz features and show you how to build set up quizzes for your e-learning platform.
Using the LearnDash Quiz Builder
The Quiz Builder is the most convenient way to create quizzes in LearnDash.
Before we can jump to creating a new quiz , we need to adjust a couple of global settings:
Under the Quizzes section, navigate over to the Settings tab. Make sure the Quiz Builder is enabled and you have adjusted the number of questions that you want appearing on the quiz. You can always add more using the quiz builder, but it’s good to maintain a standard across all course quizzes.
While you’re here, you can also change the default time format or quiz templates if you’re using them.
But for now, let’s move on to using the quiz builder.
Adding a New Quiz using the Quiz Builder
The great thing about the LearnDash quiz builder is that it’s fairly intuitive.
There isn’t a lot of deep-diving into the documentation required to figure it out.
To add a new quiz using the quiz builder, click on the Add New button and then click on the ‘builder‘ tab in the navigation bar.
(I mean, I did tell you it was pretty intuitive.)
At the top, you’ll see this bar
On clicking Expand All you can
- view all the questions,
- select question types,
- add questions and answers,
- and rearrange the order to suit your liking.
Adding Questions to you Quizzes
With LearnDash, each question has its own dedicated page and is reusable.
You can access them in the ‘Questions’ section. You can change question settings either from the question’s individual page or using the quiz builder. Here, we’ll be specifically talking about using the quiz builder, but it’s a fairly similar process.
In the quiz builder, to add a question, scroll to the end of the quiz. Here you’ll see a ‘New Question’ button. You can write a title and click on ‘add question’. Alternatively, you can use the ‘Questions’ section in the sidebar to drag and drop an existing question into the quiz.
All parts of a question – the title, the question, the answers can be edited by hovering over them and clicking on the little pencil icon to edit. The ‘remove’ option can also be accessed similarly.
To change the ‘question type’ or the ‘points awarded’ you can use the top right section of the individual question.
The ‘Question Settings’ drop-down menu helps you add correct/incorrect messages to be displayed, enable hints, and/or add Media like images and video to the question.
The beauty of creating quizzes with LearnDash is you have so many options when it comes to questions.
You can truly create quizzes based on “will this help me understand the student’s grasp on the subject better?”. And not be restricted by the available options
This next section goes over all the different types of questions and how each one can be effectively used to assess your students.
Exploring LearnDash Question Types
Single Choice
The standard close-ended question where only one choice is correct. Here since only one answer is correct, either your students know it or they don’t. Use these questions for the true-false type of answers. The responses are already pre-determined and the students don’t create their own answers. This makes them suitable for creating detailed analytics and deriving valuable insights.
Multiple Choice
Multiple-choice questions are ones where multiple answers can be correct. The question is marked correct only if all the correct answers are selected. There’s no limit to the number of correct answers. These are good to use for end-of-the-lesson, quick revision quizzes. They don’t take too much effort to answer and are a good refresher for the lesson.
Pro Tip: You can subtract points for choosing incorrect answers. Select ‘different points for each answer’ option. Assign a value say ‘2’ for every answer where you select the ‘correct’ option. For every answer, you don’t select the ‘correct’ option you can assign a value ‘1’ so one point will get deducted if an incorrect answer is selected.
Free Choice
This type of question allows students to add their own answers to an open-ended question. You can choose to accept multiple answers as correct or one answer as correct.
Capitalization isn’t taken into account when evaluating answers and you can choose answers to be one word or multiple words
Sorting Choice
A sorting question asks users to place the answers in the correct order. These can be a way to test students on bigger topics quickly. Say, explaining the water cycle. It’s not something that can be done with a multiple-choice question. So, use a sorting question. Each answer can be a stage in the water cycle, that the students can then arrange to explain their understanding of the water cycle.
Matching Choice
Similar to the sorting choice question, this question type requires students to match two choices with each other. These questions only support one to one association Criterion is the static element in the quiz while the sort elements are dragged and dropped into the corresponding field.
Fill in the blank
Your standard fill-in-the-blank questions where one part of a sentence is elements. A ‘blank’ is created by placing a part of the correct sentence inside curly brackets, like so:
The {brown} fox jumped over the {tall} fence.
If there are multiple blank spaces in the sentence then all of them must be answered correctly for the answer to be evaluated as correct.
If the different points are to be awarded for each blank, you can specify that as well. However, make sure you have this option enabled. Here’s an example:
The {brown} fox jumped over the {tall | 3} fence.
The first blank is now worth 1 point ( or your default point setting) and the second blank is worth 3 points.
Essay Questions
An open-ended essay question can be included within your quiz. Wherein students can either write their answers which you can evaluate subjectively later or give them to option to upload them as a file.
Displaying Quiz Results
Once the student has completed the quiz, they are taken to the quiz results page. For each quiz, you can customize this page.
Access these settings by navigating to the Settings tab for that particular quiz and locate the Results Page Display section.
You can add a result message which can say anything from ‘Good Job!’ to ‘Better luck next time!’ depending on the scores. You can also add a universal message like ‘This is the end of the quiz’.
If you’d like you can add a reset quiz button.
In addition to the student’s final score, you can display the average quiz score to show theirs compare. You can also assign categories to questions like Math, English, etc, and then display category-wise scores.
You can also display the number of correct questions as well as time spent answering the quiz.
Custom answer feedback is explanations for why an answer was correct or why an answer was incorrect that you can configure to give students a better understanding of their scoring.
Recommended Reading: 5 much-needed feature additions for your LearnDash Quizzes
The Next Steps….
Once you have your quizzes set up the next thing to do would be to take it to the next level – configure email notifications, create a quiz leaderboard, and constantly work on making your quizzes better. You can also check out this awesome review of a plugin called WP Quiz Pro.
But do remember, at the end of the day, the aim of quizzes is not just to test your students but also to help them learn better. So use the LearnDash features to create quizzes that will be effective for your students. You can even customize your LearnDash LMS to better suit your eLearning model.
Hope this guide helped answers any questions you had about setting up LearnDash quizzes.
Happy Quizzing!
