Google Forms – Quizzes

In this post we’re going to look at the quiz option in Forms. Since its release earlier this year, I’ve been using it with various classes mainly to check their progress, and it really is a simple but highly effective tool, which I recommend everyone to use.

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To start let’s just look at the 4 main areas you will need to use in order to set up your quizzes.

Settings>Quizzes – This is where you tell Forms that your form is a quiz and this then opens the quiz options. You can determine when the respondent sees their mark and whether they can see their answers corrected, the correct answers and the points allocated per question.

Settings>General – Here you can decide if the respondent will automatically receive a copy of what they’ve filled out or whether you give the option to do so in the form.

Questions – The bulk of the work is here, where you tell Forms which answers are correct and set the points per question. You can also set up automatic feedback for correct &/or incorrect answers, including links to websites or documents.

Responses – This is where the analysis happens after your respondents have filled out the quiz. You can see summary information for all the responses, including averages, range, problematic questions, and a summary per question so you can see which areas are causing the most problems. It also allows you to look at individual responses. Here a little summary of the main areas:

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Setting up a quiz

Click on the Settings cog at the top of the screen.

There are 3 areas, General, Presentation, Quizzes. Click on “Quizzes”.

Then click the toggle switch “Make this a quiz”.

This will then open the options below. Under “Release mark” you have the choice of either allowing the respondent to see their mark as soon as they submit the form or you may decide to send it to them at a later date.

The latter is useful if you have questions which require your review first, for example, they are written answers, or you may decide to let everyone know their scores at the same time once everyone has filled in the form. To do this, the email collection is turned on, so that the score can be emailed to them.

The second part is controlling what the respondent can see when they see their marks. You can show them the answers they got wrong (“missed questions”), the answer key (“Correct answers”), and how many have been awarded per question.

Whilst in Settings, click on the “General” option. If you chose to release the mark later in the Quizzes menu, “Collect email address” will automatically be selected. However, even if you choose to release the mark immediately, you can manually select this open.

Underneath you have the “Response receipts” option. This allows the respondent to receive a copy of the form filled out with their answers in their email. Clicking in this opens 2 further options, the first “If respondent requests it” adds a question at the end of the form, to give the respondent the option of receiving the filled out form, and the second does it automatically, so doesn’t add a question.

Click “Save” once done.

If the “If respondent requests it” option is selected, the respondent will see this option at the bottom of the form:

They just click on the toggle switch if they want a copy.

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Setting up the questions in the quiz

Now it’s time to tell Forms which questions are correct, etc. Click on the “Questions” tab. Here we can see that the email address collection has been added to the top of the form. You can’t move this.

I add a question as normal. As you can see, at the bottom of the question, you have “Answer key”. Click on that to enter edit the answer key.

It’ll prompt you to choose a correct answer or answers. Just click on the answer that is correct.

You can also set the points value for the question. Fortunately, the default value can now be changed in the Preference menu (see chapter 7).

You’ll then have your correct answer highlighted and the points value. If you select the wrong answer, click it again to remove it.

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Adding feedback to your answers

You have the option to add automatic feedback to your questions. Click on “Add Answer Feedback”. You have 2 options, you can leave feedback for incorrect answers and/or correct answers.

To add feedback just type in the box, where it says “Enter feedback”.

You do the same for the correct answers, just by clicking on the “Correct answers” tab.

Not only can you leave text feedback but you can also add links. This is particularly nice, if you want to direct the student to some further reading related to the question or to some extra help.

Click on the link icon. There are two parts: “Link to” is where you paste in your link, and “Text to display” is where you add the name of the link, i.e. what the respondent sees to click on.

Here I’ve pasted in a link to a Google Doc with an explanation of this particular grammar point. The link can be to anything, YouTube video, a website, images, etc. Click “Add” then “Save”.

It shows you that this question has a link added to it.

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Reviewing the summary of responses

Once you receive some responses, you will of course want to review and analyse them. Forms provides two main ways, either looking at summary of all the responses, or looking at the individual responses. Let’s look at the “summary” first of all.

Click on the “Responses” tab. Then if not already selected, click on “Summary”.

Under Insights, you’ll see the average (mean), median and range of the responses. Then underneath, a graph showing you the spread of the results. So, very quickly I can see that the majority of those who did my test, didn’t do particularly well, as I was hoping that most would get 4 or 5.

Under that Forms automatically highlights the most problematic questions, i.e. which ones respondents got wrong the most. Here I can see the last two questions caused the most problems, so immediately I can see where I need to focus my attention on in a future class.

Then you have the list of respondents, their total scores and when their scores were released. This is ordered by the release date, which I don’t find that useful, I would prefer it to sort by score. However, this is a nice, quick summary which will help you identify who needs help.

From this table, you can click on a line to go directly to that individual’s responses, again to see where in particular they need help.

Sending emails to respondents with their responses & the answer key

If the email setting was selected earlier, you can also send the students or particular students, a copy of their responses along with the correct answers and feedback, by clicking on “Release Scores”.

This opens up the Release Scores dialogue box. In here you can add a message to the respondents and then click on who you want to send the emails to. By default, all of the respondents are selected. Then click “Send Emails and Release”.

You can do this whether you selected early that they can see their result immediately or later.

Finally, you can also look at the summary of each question, to see not only which ones are causing problems but also what alternative answers the respondents are choosing. For example, in question 4, a lot of my students have chosen “a lot” instead of “a lot of”, so I can see that I need to remind of when we use one and not the other.

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Reviewing individual responses

To see each individual’s response, click on “individual” near the top. It shows you each response in chronological order. It shows their email address, the response number, gives you the possibility of printing it, and the possibility of deleting it. To navigate through them, either click on the arrows or double-click on the number in the box and type in the response you want.

Below that it shows you the score for that respondent, if the score has already been released to them or not, and the option to release the score (similar to above).

Underneath it shows the questions, with whether they got them right or wrong, plus it shows the correct answers, any feedback that you set up, and any links that you added earlier. This is exactly how the respondents see it, when the score is released.

You also have the option of adding individual feedback, by clicking on “Add individual feedback” under any of the questions. This can be useful if you haven’t set up any automatic feedback or if you have questions that can’t be automatically corrected, for example, a piece of written text. Type in your feedback and if you want, you can add a link like we saw above. Then press “Save”.

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How can respondents see their score?

If the “release mark immediately” option was selected earlier, when the respondent submits the forms, on the confirmation page, they will have the option “View your score”.

Clicking on that will take them to the form filled in with their answers, and depending on the options you chose, will have the answer key and feedback.

The other way I mentioned above is that they receive an email when the scores are released. This is the email they receive:

It contains their total and then when they click on “View”, it takes them to the form filled out with their answers and depending on the options you chose when setting up the quiz, the answer key, feedback and any links you added. this means that they have a permanent copy to review, which is better than only seeing it when they submit the form.

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I’ve been using these quizzes since they were introduced and once set up they are extremely useful in quickly identifying where my students need extra help.

In most cases I’ve found that as all the analysis is done within Forms I often don’t need to set up a Sheet to analyse the data, which saves me a lot of work.

However, with longer quizzes the initial set up can take a bit of time, especially if you’re adding feedback and links, but if you reuse this quizzes or share them with colleagues then they are definitely worthwhile.