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Investigate Educational Technologies :: Illinois Compass

Creating Quizzes with Randomly Generated Questions

Illinois Compass allows instructors to create quizzes that randomly select questions from a set of questions. By choosing this option, it is possible for each student who takes the assessment to have different questions. Also, if students are allowed to take an assessment multiple times, they can be presented with different questions each time that they take the assessment.

Creating Question Sets

Question sets are groups of questions that represent an individual question. When students take a randomly generated assessment, a random question will be selected from the question set by the computer. For example, if there are 8 questions in the question set, the computer will choose one of the 8 questions randomly. This option helps to ensure that students are unable to copy off of the assessments of others.
Note: Once students have taken the assessment, it is not possible to add or delete questions in the question set.

Click on the Build Tab and select on Assessments.

Screenshot of Build Tab and Assessments Button

Click on Go to Question Database.

Screenshot of Go to Question Database button

For instructions on creating categories, please see our web page Developing the Question Database.

For instructions on creating questions, please see our web page Question Types.

Creating Randomly Generated Assessments

Create an assessment and add at least one question. For information on how to do this, see our web page Creating Assessments.

Choose the Build tab and click on Assessments.

Screenshot of Build Tab and Assessments Button

Click on the title of the quiz that you wish to add question sets to.

Screenshot of Select Assessment

Click on Add to Assessment and select Question Set.

Screenshot of Add to Assessment button

In the question database screen, you can add questions to your assessment.

  1. Select whether you want to be in the Category View or Question View. The category view will display both categorized and uncategorized questions. The question view will list all questions, whether or not they have been categorized.
  2. Select the check boxes for the questions that you want to add to the assessment.
  3. Click Add Selected.

Screenshot of Add Questions to an Assessment Page

This will create a Question Set.

  1. Determine how many questions will be drawn from the question set for the assessment. For example, if a question set has 3 questions and the instructor chooses to add 2 questions to the assessment, Illinois Compass will randomly choose 2 question from the 3 each time a student takes a quiz.
  2. Decide how many points each question will be worth.
  3. Select Update Total to add the total points for the assessment.

Screenshot of Question Set Page

To Preview the assessment, go back to the Assessments main screen, and click on the gray arrow next to the Assessment name.

Screenshot of Preveiw Assessment button

The assessment with the randomly generated questions will appear in a pop-up window. This is how the assessment will appear to the students.

Screenshot of Assessment Preview