Online quiz question-building tips, and considerations about relative importance

Building a pool of questions for online quizzes (we use Moodle now, but this ought to apply to most such Course Management Systems) requires some considerations that may not be obvious at first. It also raises questions about relative importance of quizzes at different times in the semester.

Quiz question tips: in order to make best use of moodle’s random-pool and random-shuffle mechanism, each question must be written to stand on its own. Further, the answers will be shuffled as well, so they may occur in any sequence (do not use phrases like “None of the above”).

Do not assume any time-based or contextual reference points, as this question could crop up 3 months later, all on its own. Make sure to include fully any book title references. Use standard tag-prefixes in the question title (note that the question title is not seen by the student) as tips for the teacher: for example, “Grammar” or “TKAM”. If a question derives from a textbook location, include that location in the questiontitle: e.g. Grammar 15914 Verbs.

Given that the final grade for the course is intended to reflect the student’s knowledge at the end of the school year (not necessarily a given, when we think about it -- the grade reflects performance throughout the school year), the earlier quizzes should probably count for a bit less than later quizzes. Moodle allows us to easily do this, by simply changing the MaximumGrade value to, say, 50 for the first quiz, then 75 for the second quiz, and so on. The number of questions may stay the same. The system automatically calculates the proper percentages. Further, as Renweb consistently displays each item as a percentage, the earlier quizzes will look as important to the students -- thus motivating them -- while not actually counting as highly when compared to the later quizzes.

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