How to Make an Effective Quiz or Test

Question: What makes a great online quiz?

Answer: Read on to find outWith hundreds of thousands of quizzes created by GoConqr users, from language teachers to corporate trainers, and professional study group participants to high school students, we’ve learned a few things about how to make a great quiz.Here are our 6 tips to consider for a successful online quiz experience

1. Have a clear objective

Teaching, Evaluating, EntertainingWhat do you hope to accomplish with your online quiz? The answer to this will affect the format and distribution of your quiz.Is the quiz designed to teach?Quizzing does not just test – with carefully selected questions and appropriate feedback; quizzes can be a fantastic teaching or training tool. For example, you might want to make a great quiz to train employees on the features of a new product, or to enable students to visualise and recall a complex system, like the circulation system.Is the quiz designed to evaluate?This is the classic use of quizzes as a testing or assessment tool – sometimes you just want to know if your people know what they need to know – whether they are potential job candidates you want to pre-screen, or students you need to be sure are prepared for a big exam. If your primary purpose is assessment you can limit the number of attempts allowed, set a duration for the quiz, or limit time allowed for individual questions.Is the quiz designed to entertain?While quizzes designed primarily for teaching or assessment should ideally be engaging for the quiz taker, sometimes quizzes are designed purely for fun! If the goal to make a great quiz is to engage an audience, you should make it as attractive and interactive as possible, using images and a variety of question types to hold the quiz takers’ attention through to the end of the quiz.

2. Know your audience

Your audience is will depend on your objective. How you reach them depends on how you distribute your quiz. GoConqr provides many options for sharing quizzes. You can embed a quiz in your blog or website to keep users engaged, monitoring their quiz views and viewing global results.You can also easily share the quiz on social networks to reach your audience through your most effective social media channels.If your quiz is designed to teach employees or students, you can share it in a Group on GoConqr where group discussions can provide context and feedback.Alternatively, if you want to assess external candidates or test contractors, Smart Links is the ideal tool as it combines private distribution of your quiz with a complete reporting solution.

3. Ask the right questions

The right type of question will depend on the purpose of your quiz. As a rule, you should avoid ambiguity in the phrasing of your questions.A true/false response question is the simplest question type – and combined with an opportunity for review and explanation, it can be a valuable tool in a quiz where the objective is learning. However, as responses to true/false questions have a 50% chance of being right (or wrong!).Multiple choice questions have the advantage of being very easy to assess. The key to making good multiple choice questions is having plausible alternatives to the correct answer. In addition allowing multiple simultaneous responses (using the multiple choice option in GoConqr) means that the quiz taker really must consider the alternatives instead of simply guessing.Fill-in-the-blanks questions with drag and drop answers are engaging because, in addition to testing knowledge, they are truly interactive – allowing the test taker to manipulate their response rather than simply selecting among alternatives. Combining this question type with an image for the person to label can be an entertaining experience – for example labelling a map or diagram.

4. Remember the Goldilocks effect...

... not too long, not too short!To make a great quiz you need to consider both the overall quiz duration and individual questions on the quiz. You need to consider the length of time it is likely to take respondents to answer your questions. If you need to cover a lot of material, splitting the content into two (or more) quizzes may be your best option.If the quiz is designed for teaching, you may want to include a lot of information in the question – however including too much information can be overwhelming. A better approach is to keep the questions short – with GoConqr’s quiz tool you can provide explanations that the quiz taker can read when reviewing their results.The length of answers is also important to consider for certain question types. If you ask respondents to fill-in-the-blanks with text, the answers should be short and not contain spaces. With multiple choice questions, it is good practice to keep the alternative responses similar lengths.

5. Get answers about the answers

Reports are an important part of many online quizzes, particularly if you are using quizzes for assessment. GoConqr quiz reporting delivers a detailed breakdown of respondents’ performance on quizzes, including question level analysis.This provides feedback on the test takers, but may also provide useful information on the test makers or instructors. If there is an easy question that many people got wrong, perhaps the question was unclear. If there are parts of the quiz that many people underperform on, it may indicate the need for further training in that area.

6. Repeat as necessary

A quiz result gives you a snapshot of a person’s knowledge at a particular point in time. Often, you will want to iterate the process by giving them another quiz in the future. You might even want to repeat a quiz with the same group of users – for example, to assess the effectiveness of a teaching intervention on learning outcomes, or simply to ensure that the information learned has been retained.GoConqr’s Smart Links allows you to easily resend links to individuals, as well as organising people according to share lists to rapidly share quizzes. With reporting, you can monitor performance on a series of quizzes over time, ensuring that training has been effective. This feature is also ideal for situations where periodic testing is required, such as meeting compliance obligations.GoConqr’s quiz tool is free and easy to use, so you can create an effective quiz in minutes – whatever your objective.