Use a Nexus Quiz to evaluate student understanding of your course material. Use a wide range of question types to design your layout and order, and provide different kinds of feedback based on how your students performed.
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Overview
Question Types
An Overview of Quizzes in Nexus
Quizzes in Nexus are used to evaluate student understanding of material. Nexus quizzes are comprised of a Quiz activity that contains one or more questions from your course's Question bank. The Quiz activity lets you administer a wide range of questions (see Quiz Question Types in Nexus below) within a specific layout and order, provide different kinds of feedback based on how a student performed on the quiz, and control the ways that students can access the quiz. The Question bank serves as an organized repository of all the questions in your course, separate from any quiz activities that might use them.
Nexus provides separate tools to take surveys and polls, rather than assess students. See Add a Questionnaire Activity in Nexus, and Add a Choice Activity in Nexus (Single Question Poll). Note: Questions used in Questionnaires and Choice activities are not stored in the Quiz question bank.
The following steps summarize the recommended process for creating a quiz in Moodle:
Step 1:
Create and organize questions in your course's Question bank.
The Nexus Question bank allows you to create, preview, and organize questions in categories before using them in a Quiz activity. Question categories can also be nested hierarchically. You can create new questions from scratch, or you can copy a Question bank from another Nexus course (such as one you taught in a prior semester), or you can import questions from a separate file. For more, see Use the Nexus Question Bank.
Step 2:
Create and configure a new Quiz activity in the Section of your course where you want the quiz to appear.
A Quiz activity in Nexus can be configured in a variety of ways depending on your pedagogical goals. For example, you can configure a quiz to have no time limit, or the quiz can be timed such that students have a set number of minutes within which to complete it. These settings control a Quiz activity separately from the actual content of the quiz, i.e. configuring a quiz and adding questions to a quiz are two separate steps. For more information, see Add & Configure a Quiz Activity in Nexus.
Step 3:
Add questions to a configured Quiz activity from the Question bank.
Once you have questions in your Question bank and you have a configured Quiz activity, you can edit the Quiz activity to select questions from your Question bank and arrange them in your quiz according to the way you want them to appear for students. The Editing quiz page also allows you to add section headings (sub-headings) within the quiz. For more, see Add or Edit Questions in a Nexus Quiz.
Step 4:
Administer, review, and grade a Quiz activity.
The last step is to configure how you want Moodle to administer and score your quiz. Once you configure scoring, you can release a quiz simply by making it available (visible) to students, or you can control access to your quiz using a variety of methods, such as restricting the quiz to a particular Group of students. You can also configure the quiz settings to give certain students extended time, or re-open a closed quiz to allow particular students to retake it. Once students make attempts on the quiz, you can review their attempts and monitor their progress. Nexus will automatically score the majority of question-types in the Quiz activity, but you can also manually override the grade or change the grade calculation schema. For more, see Administer, Review, and Grade a Nexus Quiz.
Quiz Question Types in Nexus
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Calculated and Calculated Simple
Calculated questions require a student to calculate a numerical answer given specific values for variables in a formula. For example, a question might ask a student to compute the area of a triangle given two numbers for the base and height of the triangle. The numbers for the variables are generated randomly per attempt, so that different students taking the quiz will be given different sets of numbers. The Calculated simple question type is a simpler version of the Calculated question type. See Calculated Questions and Calculated Simple Questions.
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Calculated Multichoice
These questions require a student to choose the correct numeric answer from a selection of answers. The answers are computed based on a randomly generated set of values for variables in a formula. For example, a question might ask the student to compute the area of a triangle given two randomly generated values for the base and height of a triangle, and then provide a set of possible numerical answers for the student to choose from. See Calculated Multichoice Questions.
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Drag and Drop onto Image
Respondents must drag and drop images and text onto a background image with preset fields set by the instructor. For example, an instructor can have a diagram and ask students to drag and drop labels. (Similar to Drag and drop markers, but students see preset target areas and can only drop items into those areas.) See Drag & Drop onto Image Questions in Nexus.
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Drag and Drop Markers
These questions require a student to drag and drop a marker onto a background image. The instructor will have defined preset drop zones which determine whether or not a student is correct. For example, a question might ask a student to drag and drop the names of countries onto a world map or the names of plants onto a picture of a forest. (Similar to Drag and drop onto image, but students do not see preset target areas and can drop markers anywhere on the image.) See Drag & Drop Marker Questions in Nexus.
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Drag and Drop into Text
Students are asked to drag and drop text boxes into questions' text. These could be used as a fill in the blank question to make a sentence true or to match definitions to terms. See Drag & Drop into Text Questions in Nexus.
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Embedded Answers (Cloze)
These very flexible questions consist of a passage of text (in Nexus format) that has various answers embedded within it, including multiple choice, short answers and numerical answers. See Embedded Answer (Cloze) Questions.
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Essay
In response to a question (the text for which may include an image), the respondent writes an answer in essay format. These must be graded manually by an instructor. Watch a YouTube video on Moodle Essay Questions.
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Matching
The respondent must match the correct answers with each question. A list of sub-questions is provided, along with a list of answers. See Matching Questions.
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Random Short Answer Matching
Similar to Matching Questions, in Random Short Answer questions there are sub-questions drawn randomly from the short answer questions in the the current category. After an optional introduction, the respondent is presented with two or more sub-questions, each with a drop-down menu box opposite listing available answers. The student then matches each answer to a sub-question.
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Multiple Choice
In response to a question (the text for which may include an image), the respondent chooses from multiple answers. There are two types of multiple choice questions - single answer (where there is only one correct answer) and multiple answer (where the student can pick all answers that apply). See Multiple Choice Questions.
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Numerical
From the student perspective, a numerical question looks just like a short-answer question in that they enter their answer into a short edit box. The difference is that the answer has to be numerical and answers are allowed to have an accepted error range. This allows a continuous range of answers within a particular tolerance of the correct answer. See Numerical Questions.
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Select Missing Words
These questions contain drop-down lists of possible answer choices embedded within text. Students must select the correct word or phrase from these lists given the text. See Select Missing Words Questions.
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Short Answer
In response to a question (the text for which may include an image), the respondent enters a word or phrase. There may be several possible correct answers, with different grades for various options. Answers may or may not be sensitive to case. See Short Answer Questions.
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True/False
In response to a question (the text for which may include an image), the student selects either True or False. See True/False Questions.
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Description
Description is not a question type, but a way to display additional text (including images) within the quiz. For example, this can be used to provide information needed by a group of questions.
If you are having difficulty or you have unanswered questions, please contact the Help Desk through the ITS Service Catalog or call (518) 388-6400.
Information attributed to UMass Amherst