Add a quiz

A quiz checks that a lesson landed. It arrives as its own email, and where the learner's mail client supports it, they answer without leaving their inbox.

The title is the subject line

As with lessons, the quiz title is what appears in the learner's inbox. "Check what you know about IMAP" reads better there than "Quiz 2".

Questions and answers

Each question is multiple choice, and you need at least one question to save the quiz.

Mark every answer that is correct, more than one answer can be correct, and a learner has to select all of them to get the question right. If you only intend one correct answer, mark only one.

Questions and answers are limited to 500 characters each, which is more than enough for anything worth asking in an email.

The passing score

A percentage from 0 to 100. The learner must reach it to pass.

Be careful setting this high. A quiz is usually there to make someone think, not to keep them out, and on a blocking quiz, the passing score is what stands between a learner and the rest of your course.

All questions, or a random selection

Two strategies:

All questions - every learner gets every question, in the order you wrote them.
Random questions - each learner gets a different subset, which makes answers harder to share and gives a retake a different shape.

With random selection, a learner gets roughly two-thirds of your questions, and never fewer than five.

Random selection does nothing with five questions or fewer

Below six questions there is nothing to select from, so every learner simply gets all of them. Nothing warns you, the setting is saved and quietly has no effect.

If you want learners to get different questions, write at least six. Nine or ten gives it something to work with.

When it arrives

A quiz has a waiting period similar to any other content, starting from when the previous item was sent, when a blocking quiz or assignment is submitted, or when a non-blocking quiz reaches its deadline. See Write a lesson for details on how it works.

Quizzes are often worth a shorter gap than a lesson, a few hours after the lesson they follow, while it is still fresh, rather than days later.

What happens if they do not pass

Four settings decide this, and two of them are on by default.

Setting	Default	What it does
Blocking	On	The course does not continue until the learner passes. On a quiz with routing rules, their first submission decides where they go next instead. Blocking quizzes also never show learners the correct answers.
Limited attempts	On	The learner gets a fixed number of tries rather than unlimited retakes. Unavailable on a quiz with routing rules, which only ever counts the first submission.
Deadline	None	Days to complete it. The quiz link expires afterwards, and a reminder goes out shortly before.
Reminder interval	None	Without a deadline, nudges a learner who has not answered, every so many days.

These have real consequences for a learner - including having their enrollment stopped - so they are worth understanding before you turn them up. When a learner fails a quiz covers what each one actually does to somebody taking your course.

Two failures on a quiz ends the course for that learner

This is what happens with a blocking quiz that has limited attempts, and both are on by default.

Fail once, and the quiz is sent again the next day. Fail that second attempt, and the enrollment stops: no further lessons arrive, and their progress ends there.

The only way back is to enroll again, which starts the course from the beginning. There is no way to resume where they left off.

A quiz that is not blocking never does this. The score is recorded and the course carries on regardless.

A quiz with routing rules never does this either. Failing is just a result like any other: the learner is sent onto the track your rules choose, often a remedial one, and the course carries on. See Route learners by their quiz result.

Publish it

Like lessons, a new quiz is unpublished and is not delivered to anyone until you publish it.