Templates Create a poll

How to make a classroom quiz or practice test

A short quiz is one of the quickest ways to check what a group has understood. The main choices are how you score it and when participants see the answers.

Practice quiz or formal test?

Decide first what the quiz is for, because it changes the settings:

  • A practice quiz helps people learn. Show each participant their score and the correct answers straight after they submit, so the feedback arrives while the questions are fresh.
  • A formal test measures what people know. Allow one submission and release the correct answers only after the test closes, so early finishers can’t share them.

VotePoll’s practice quiz and formal test templates are set up this way.

Questions that can be scored

  • Multiple choice and Pictures — one correct answer, or several. With several correct answers, partial credit is exact: correct selections add credit, wrong ones take the same share away, never below zero.
  • Text answer — list the accepted answers (for example “1945” and “in 1945”) and choose whether capital letters must match.
  • Ranking — set the correct order; the answer scores when the order matches.

Rating and Meeting questions can be part of a quiz but are not scored — handy for a “how confident did you feel?” question at the end.

Writing good quiz questions

Instead of “Which of these is not a mammal? Whale, bat, shark, dolphin”

Better “Which of these animals is a fish? Whale, bat, shark, dolphin” — same options, asked the positive way round

Negative wording (“not”, “except”) trips up people who know the answer. Make every wrong answer plausible, too.

  • Test one idea per question, so a wrong answer tells you what was misunderstood.
  • Keep wrong answers similar in length and style to the right one.
  • For text answers, think about the spellings and formats people might use, and accept all the correct ones.

Points and pass mark

Give harder questions more points, and set a pass mark between 1 and 100% of the available points. Participants see whether they passed only if you show them their score.

If you show scores and also let people change their answers, someone could change one answer at a time to work out which is correct. VotePoll warns you about that combination; for a formal test, turn answer changes off.

Running it in class

  • Show the QR code on the screen; participants open the quiz on their phones without an account.
  • Ask for a first name or nickname only if you need to match results to people — nothing more.
  • Split a longer test into sections, so it is shown one part at a time.
  • Set a closing time for the end of the lesson, then release the answers and go through the questions most people missed.

On the manage page you see every response with its points and result, statistics for each scored question, and a CSV export.