Designing Quizzes

1A test that marks itself

A chemistry teacher in Rubavu gives her three S5 classes a ten-minute check at the start of every week: 135 scripts a week, about 40 minutes of marking. A Google Forms quiz marks the multiple-choice part the moment each student submits, tells each one which items they missed, and gives the teacher a list of the questions most students got wrong. She only marks the written answers herself.

A quiz is still a form, so everything from the last two lessons applies. What changes is that every question gets a correct answer and a number of points, and that the quiz must be fair: easy to answer for a student who knows the work, hard to guess for one who does not.

2Step by step: turn a form into a quiz

1. Create a form titled S5 Chemistry weekly check, week 3. Open Settings and switch on Make this a quiz.
2. Under Release marks choose Immediately after each submission for a practice check, or Later, after manual review for a test with written answers. The second choice also turns on email collection, so the marks can be sent to each student.
3. Under Respondent settings decide what students see afterwards: missed questions, correct answers and point values. For a practice check, show all three; for a test that another class will sit later, hide the correct answers.
4. On the Questions tab, add a multiple-choice question, then click Answer key at the bottom left of the card.
5. Click the correct option, set the points, and click Add answer feedback to write one message for a wrong answer and one for a right answer. Click Done.

The answer key behaves differently for each question type:

3Writing questions that are fair

Automatic marking only helps if the questions measure what students know. Five rules make a multiple-choice question fair:

1. One clear correct answer. An expert reading the options should agree on it at once.
2. Plausible distractors. Each wrong option should be a real mistake, such as confusing respiration with photosynthesis, not a silly filler.
3. No length giveaway. If the correct option is always the longest and most careful one, students learn to pick the longest.
4. Spread the correct position. Use A, B, C and D about equally often, or switch on Shuffle option order for each question. Do not shuffle options such as "Both A and B", which then point at the wrong letters.
5. Feedback that teaches. "Wrong" helps nobody. "Oxygen is released, not absorbed: re-read the photosynthesis equation" sends the student back to the right place.

In Settings → Presentation, Shuffle question order gives each student a different order, which makes copying from a neighbour harder. On school-managed Chromebooks a school Google Workspace account can also switch on locked mode, which stops students opening other tabs while the quiz is open.

4Reading the results: which questions failed?

After the quiz the Responses → Summary tab shows the average, median and range of the scores and lists the frequently missed questions. Two numbers tell a teacher whether a question did its job.

The facility index is the proportion of students who answered correctly:

$$p=\frac{\text{number correct}}{\text{number who answered}}p\; =\; \backslash frac\{\backslash text\{number\; correct\}\}\{\backslash text\{number\; who\; answered\}\}$$

The discrimination index compares the students with the highest and lowest total scores. Take the top group and the bottom group, each of size $nn$:

$$D=\frac{U-L}{n}D\; =\; \backslash frac\{U\; -\; L\}\{n\}$$

where $UU$ and $LL$ are the numbers correct in the upper and lower groups. $DD$ runs from $-1-1$ to $11$. A question with $DD$ near 0 or below does not separate students who know the work from those who do not.

5Hands-on: a self-marking quiz for your class

1. Pick one topic from another subject you are studying this term. Write a blueprint with at least 8 questions: 6 multiple-choice or checkbox questions, 1 short answer and 1 paragraph.
2. Build it as a quiz. Give every question points and feedback for both right and wrong answers. Choose Later, after manual review.
3. Check the positions of your correct options: no letter should be used more than three times out of six.
4. Ask five classmates to take it. Mark the paragraph answers in the Individual view, then release the marks.
5. Work out $pp$ for each question and name the question you would rewrite.

Check: the quiz is ready when every respondent receives a mark that includes the paragraph, and every wrong answer shows feedback that sends the student to the right place.