When creating quizzes, you have a choice. To create a quiz the fastest, easiest way possible, use the Basic quiz editor. For greater control over how your quizzes look and function, use the Advanced quiz editor.

Why did Quia change how quizzes work?

Over the years, we've heard a lot of ideas from subscribers about how to make quizzes better. We also had some ideas of our own. We think the new tools will allow you to make better quizzes than before and do it more quickly and easily. One of the biggest changes we made was to eliminate quiz sessions. After seven years and millions of sessions, picking unique session names that no other Quia member had ever used could be quite a challenge! Now, when you create a quiz, you can send students directly to its Web address (URL). Students' results are tracked automatically, without the need for sessions.

What happened to my quiz sessions?

If you created quizzes before August 2005, you will have used quiz sessions, the old way to track students' scores. Now, after the change, you'll have a separate quiz for each of your old sessions - in addition to the original quiz itself. For example, if you had a quiz titled "Chemistry Midterm" and three sessions, "chem1midterm", "chem2midterm", and "chem3midterm", you'll now have these four quizzes in your account:

Chemistry Midterm
Chemistry Midterm: session chem1midterm
Chemistry Midterm: session chem2midterm
Chemistry Midterm: session chem3midterm

Each of the quizzes has its own URL. When students visit the URL, they can take the quiz, and their scores will be tracked. You can view the results by clicking "Grade".

One of the benefits of this change is that quizzes now work the same way as activities and surveys: students access them using a URL (rather than a session name).

How do I control which classes can use my quiz?

This is done using class rosters. First, click Classes in the left menu and click Create a new class and follow the directions. Repeat this step for each class that you teach. Although this will require a little up-front work, you'll only need to do it once. Afterward, it is easy to restrict certain quizzes to particular classes only. Click Quizzes in the left menu, find your quiz, and click the Assign link for it. Click the button labeled Restrict access to only my students and then select the classes that will be allowed to take the quiz. If you wish, you can even change the quiz's settings on a class-by-class basis, including setting up different access times for different classes.

Why do I have labels when I didn't create any?

In the old quiz editor, there was a way to pick random sets of questions by question type. For example, suppose your quiz had a total of twenty multiple choice questions and ten fill-in questions. You could specify that each student receive, say, eight multiple choice and two fill-ins selected at random from the full set. This ability is still supported, but it is handled using the new, more powerful label feature. So, if your original quiz used random sets, you'll see that it now uses labels.

Why do I have duplicate questions in the Question Bank?

The Question Bank contains all of the questions from all of your quizzes. If you have multiple copies of a quiz, each of its questions will appear multiple times in the Question Bank. If you'd like, you can consolidate your questions, sharing them across quizzes instead of duplicating them. This way, if you want to change a question, you can modify it once and the change will be reflected automatically in every quiz in which the question appears.

Should I use the Basic editor or the Advanced editor?

If you're new to Quia, start with the basic quiz editor, available on the Quizzes > Basic page. It's easy to learn and, despite what its name suggests, is anything but basic in terms of functionality. You can create quizzes with any of eight question types. You can also randomize questions; track student results in a variety of ways; set access dates and times; and include images, audio, and even LaTeX for math symbols.

The advanced editor offers even more. It works in conjunction with the Question Bank, where you can create and categorize questions so that they can be reused across multiple quizzes. Categorization is done using labels. You create labels for criteria that are important to you and apply one or more labels to each question. For example, you might give a math question the labels "difficult", "quadratic equation", and "unit 2" (because it relates to unit 2 of your textbook). When questions are categorized in such a way, it becomes possible to create comprehensive midterms and final exams that reuse questions from throughout the year.

Besides sharing questions and creating labels, the advanced editor also gives you more control over the layout of your quiz page. You can insert text, images, audio clips, and file attachments anywhere on the page, even in between questions. This is perfect for reading comprehension sections and other situations where a block of text or an image is followed by several questions that relate to it.

The advanced editor also supports nongraded survey questions - for collecting opinions and demographic information - and provides additional randomization capabilities.