What should I consider before building a new quiz?

Building a quiz can be a big job! There are a lot of points to consider and decisions to be made before you get started:

  • How many attempts will your learners have to complete the quiz?
  • Do you have to worry about security or privacy when your learners are taking quizzes?
  • What will your learners see after they have submitted a quiz?

Consider the feature below to guide you through building a quiz. Each represents a page that you will fill out when you start building your quiz in the Quizzes tool.

Availability Dates & Conditions

  • Availability

Learners will be able to see but not interact with, or begin, a quiz before a Start Date or after an End Date.

  • Release Conditions

Release conditions allow you to define how, and when, an assignment will display to your learners.

  • Special Access

Life happens, customize availability to accommodate learners unique circumstances with Special Access.

Types of Special Access:

1. Change quiz availability, duration and attempts allowed on a learner by learner basis. For example, providing a learner with accommodations an extra 30 minutes to submit their quiz.

2. Have the quiz apply to only a select group of learners. For example, a make-up quiz, or extra credit opportunity.

  • Password

If you need to provide controlled access to a quiz in a shared space, you can add a password to your quizzes! This is a great way to ensure that your learners have what they need before you provide the password and allow them to begin a quiz, especially in a blended environment.

Timing & Display

  • Timing

No Time Limit is set as the default timing for building new quizzes.

Do you have a specific amount of time you would like learners to have to complete a quiz? Use an Enforced time limit to dictate how long a learner can interact with quiz questions. You can also assign a grace period. If you are using the Enforced time limit, you will have additional options for how the quiz will react to a learner who exceeds the limit: allow the learner to continue, prevent the learner from making further changes, and allow the learner to continue but automatically assign the attempt a score of zero.

If you are offering formative assessment or review quizzes you may only include a recommended time limit. This will have no impact to how the learner can interact with a quiz past this time.

  • Paging

Control how many questions will display on each page of your quiz. If you have a longer quiz we recommend that you have fewer questions per page.

You can also prevent your learners from moving backwards through completed pages using the Prevent going back to previous pages checkbox.

  • Shuffle Quiz

You can Shuffle questions at the quiz level to randomize the order in which questions display.

  • Display

If you've included hints in your questions, you'll need to select the Allow Hints checkbox.

If you turn on Disable Email, Instant Messages, and Alerts within Brightspace , learners cannot access the Brightspace Email, Instant Messages, or their alerts if they have a quiz attempt in progress.

  • Header and Footer

Provide additional text that will be permanent header or footers for each page using the HTML editor.

Attempts & Completion

  • Attempts

You can define how many attempts your learners can make on a quiz, and specify grading behaviors. If you are using multiple attempts you can choose from the following Overall Grade Calculation, options: Highest attempt, Lowest attempt, Average of all attempts, First attempt or Last attempt.

Evaluation & Feedback

  • Auto-publish attempt results immediately upon completion

Some question types allow for automatic grading. Leave the Auto-publish attempt results immediately upon completion selected to let Brightspace do your grading for you.

  • Synchronize to grade book on publish

Do you want your Brightspace to automatically export auto-graded quizzes to your grade book for you, make sure you select Synchronize to grade book on publish.

  • When published, display to learners

Make sure you select Attempt grade to show learners their quiz grade when it is published. You also have the option to display all questions or incorrect questions only, with or without correct answers.

  • Customize Quiz Results Displays

Edit the Primary View to change how much information you want to share with your learners on a summary page. Did you offer a review quiz, and want learners to see the correct answers? For learners to have access to the correct answers as a review aid, select All questions, Show the learner's responses to the displayed questions , and Show the correct answers to the displayed questions . Use the Message field to help direct learners to their next topic, or activity!

Add an Additional View if you want to change what your learners see after a certain date. This can be helpful if you eventually want them to see the correct answers, but not until the end of the course.

Source: Brightspace Certificate course - Learning Environment Building Assessments and Grading Learners, April 2023.