Quiz & Assessment Authoring

Who this guide is for: Admins, Owners and Instructors (on the courses they are assigned to) building quizzes inside a course.

A quiz lives on a Quiz / Assessment module in a course. You add questions, mark the correct answers, set points, and configure the pass mark and attempt rules — all from the course editor. On a published course, click Start new version first: a published version is read-only.

Step 1 — Add a quiz module

1. Go to Courses and open the course.
2. On the Modules tab, add a module of type Quiz / Assessment.

Step 2 — Build the quiz

1. On the quiz module row, click ▼ Manage Questions.
2. If the module has no quiz yet, click Create quiz.
3. Configure Settings:
   • Passing score (%) — the percentage required to pass.
   • Max attempts (0 = ∞) — 0 means unlimited.
   • Time limit (min) — leave blank for no limit.
   • Shuffle questions and Shuffle choices — randomize order per attempt.
   • Click Save settings.

Step 3 — Add questions

1. Click Add question.
2. Choose the Type, enter the Question text and configure the type’s answers:

3. Set Points (1–10) for the question.
4. Click Save question.

Short-answer questions (LMS-729)

A short-answer question is graded automatically the moment the learner submits — there is no instructor step, unlike Essay and File upload.

1. Choose Short answer (auto-graded) as the type.
2. Enter the question text.
3. Under Accepted answers, list every spelling you will accept — one per row. Click Add accepted answer for alternates. Any one match scores the question’s full points; there is no partial credit.
4. Under Matching, decide how strict the comparison is:

Writing good accepted answers:

• List the realistic variants: Ottawa, City of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
• Accents are significant. côté and cote are different words in French and do not match each other. If you will accept the unaccented spelling, add it as its own row.
• Both spellings of a term (color / colour) each need a row.
• A blank row is ignored, so an empty accepted-answer list is rejected on save.

Learners never receive the accepted answers before they submit — the list is stripped server-side. After submitting, the results page shows what they typed and, if they were wrong, the accepted answers.

Edit or delete any question from its row. Deleting a question removes it from the quiz (the learner’s past attempts are unaffected).

Knowledge checks — practice inside a lesson, not graded (LMS-1163)

A knowledge check is a short set of questions a learner answers at the end of a lesson to test their understanding. It gives instant feedback with the explanation, the learner can try again as often as they like, and nothing is recorded: no score, no attempt, no effect on completion or the certificate.

1. Build the quiz as in Steps 1–3. Use multiple choice, true/false or multi-select questions, and write an explanation for each — the explanation is what the learner sees after answering. (Short-answer, essay and file-upload questions are not shown in a knowledge check.)
2. On the quiz module row, click the edit button and tick Knowledge check, not graded. Required to complete the course turns off and cannot be turned back on while the box is ticked. Save.
3. Open the lesson the check belongs to (an HTML lesson) and add a quiz block: choose the quiz module in Quiz module, then Add block. Put it last so learners read the lesson first.

Learners do not see the knowledge check as a separate module in the course outline — only inside the lesson. Untick the box to turn the module back into a graded quiz; nothing was recorded while it was a knowledge check, so there are no attempts to clean up.

Generate questions with AI (LMS-586)

Available only when your platform has AI features enabled. The button does not appear otherwise.

The AI drafts quiz questions from source text you provide — it never invents material beyond what you paste, and it never adds anything to the quiz on its own. You review every draft and choose which to keep.

1. In the quiz builder, click Generate with AI.
2. Paste the course document’s text into Source text (a few paragraphs at minimum). Long documents are split into sections automatically so questions cover the whole text, not just the opening pages.
3. Choose how many Questions to draft (1–20) and the output Language (English or French).
4. Click Generate draft questions and wait — longer documents take longer.
5. Review the drafts: each shows the question, its type, and the correct answer(s). Untick any you don’t want, then click the add button (it reads Add 3 questions when three are ticked). Added questions become ordinary quiz questions you can edit like any other.

Good to know:

• If you asked for fewer questions than the document has sections, a notice tells you part of the document was not examined — raise the question count or generate again with the remaining text.
• Generated questions can be wrong or miss nuance. Verify each against the source before publishing — you are the author of record, the AI is a drafting assistant.
• Your source text is processed in Canada (AWS ca-central-1) and is never used to train any model.

Import questions from a file — CSV, GIFT or AIKEN (LMS-749, LMS-873)

If your questions already exist outside the platform — generated with an AI tool, kept in a spreadsheet, or exported from Moodle or another question-authoring tool — you can upload them in one step instead of entering each one by hand. Three formats are accepted:

1. In the quiz builder, click Import questions. The import panel opens.
2. Leave File format on Detect automatically, or pick the format if you know it. Detection uses the file extension (.csv, .gift) and, for .txt files, the content: ANSWER: lines mean AIKEN, {…} answer blocks mean GIFT.
3. Under Question file, choose your file (maximum 1 MB, 500 questions).
4. Nothing is imported yet. The panel checks the file and shows:
   • the format it read,
   • how many questions are ready to import, and a preview list of them,
   • every question that will be skipped, with its row (CSV) or line (GIFT / AIKEN) number and the reason.
5. If the preview is right, click the import button (it reads Import 12 questions for twelve). Otherwise click Cancel, fix the file, and choose it again. Changing File format re-checks the same file.
6. Imported questions are added to the end of the quiz and are editable afterwards like any other question. The report stays on screen so you can fix the skipped questions and import a file containing just those.

Every format goes through the same checks — question text up to 2,000 characters, choices up to 500 characters, 2–8 choices (2–6 in the CSV template, which has six choice columns), one correct answer for single-answer multiple choice — so a question that would be refused in the builder is refused in the import too, with a reason.

CSV template columns

Click Download CSV template and open it in any spreadsheet application. It contains one example row per supported type. Fill in one row per question, keeping the header row unchanged.

File rules: comma-separated CSV (semicolons are reserved for multi-value cells), quoted fields for text containing commas, maximum 500 questions per file. Column order does not matter and extra columns are ignored.

GIFT files

GIFT is Moodle’s plain-text format. Separate questions with a blank line (a question itself must not contain one). A sample file:

// Lines starting with // are comments and are ignored.
$CATEGORY: Geography

::Capital of Canada:: What is the capital of Canada? {
  =Ottawa#Right — the capital since 1857.
  ~Toronto#No, Toronto is the largest city.
  ~Vancouver
}

::Pacific:: The Pacific is the largest ocean on Earth. {T}

::Australia:: What is the capital of Australia? {=Canberra =Canberra ACT}

::Borders:: Which countries border France? {
  ~%50%Spain
  ~%50%Belgium
  ~%-100%Portugal
  ####Portugal borders Spain, not France.
}

::Tectonics:: Explain how tectonic plates create mountain ranges. {}

Canada's capital is {=Ottawa ~Toronto} in Ontario.

How each GIFT construct is imported:

These GIFT question types have no equivalent here, so the question is skipped and reported — never silently dropped:

Points: GIFT has no points field — every imported question is worth 1 point. Change it afterwards in the builder if needed.

AIKEN files

AIKEN holds single-answer multiple-choice questions only:

What is the capital of Canada?
A. Toronto
B. Ottawa
C. Vancouver
ANSWER: B

Quelle ville est la capitale du Québec?
A) Montréal
B) Québec
C) Trois-Rivières
ANSWER: B

• The question text is everything before the first option (it may span several lines).
• An option is a capital letter, then . or ), a space, and the text.
• ANSWER: gives the letter of the correct option and ends the question. A blank line between questions is optional.
• Files saved on Windows (CRLF line endings) or with a UTF-8 BOM, and accented French text, import as-is. Save the file as UTF-8.

Import troubleshooting

Configuration reference

Reordering questions

Question order is pedagogy, not decoration — a warm-up first, the hard case last — so the order you see in the builder is the order a learner gets (unless the quiz shuffles, see below).

Each question row has ↑ and ↓ buttons. They are ordinary buttons, so the order can be changed from the keyboard and is announced by a screen reader; the button at each end of the list is disabled rather than hidden, so the controls do not move under your pointer as you work down a list.

Each move saves immediately. The whole order is written, not a single swap, so two people reordering the same quiz at once end up on one of the two orders rather than on a broken one.

Shuffle overrides order. If the quiz has Shuffle questions on, the order here is the authoring order and each learner still gets a random one. Turn shuffle off if the sequence matters.

Reviewing attempts

The Attempts panel sits under the question list, and it answers the question a score cannot: what did they actually write? On a published course, where the question builder is read-only, open it with the Attempts button on the quiz module’s row.

Each row is one attempt — the learner, which attempt it was, when it started, when it was submitted, how long it took, and the score with pass or fail. An attempt still in progress is shown as such and cannot be opened: there is nothing final to review yet.

View answers expands one attempt into its questions, in quiz order:

A question the learner skipped is listed with “(no answer given)” rather than being left out — a skipped question is information.

File-upload answers show the filename as a button. Clicking it mints a download link that expires after 15 minutes; the link is never embedded in the page, and a file that failed the malware scan is refused.

Who can see attempts

Reviewing someone else’s answers needs the same reporting permission as the rest of the analytics, and it is narrowed twice over:

A Group Admin with no groups assigned sees nothing, rather than everything.

The same panel appears on Analytics → Learner Drill-Down, per course, for the times the question starts from a person rather than from a quiz.

Troubleshooting