Online Quizzes: Best Practices

Create a quiz that has a variety of quiz question types and mixture of lower and higher-level questions that elicit application, integration, and evaluation. 

Overview of question types

View a comprehensive list of D2L quiz question types here.

Create and store quiz questions into the D2L Question Library and retrieve them when you are ready to import the questions into a D2L quiz.
Options for Randomizing Quizzes (Video)

The Preview option in D2L allows you to test the accuracy of content and grading before you release a quiz.

The shift to students taking online timed quizzes and assessments in D2L has been challenging for students and academic staff. For some it has resulted in increased test-related stress and performance. It has also led to concerns about academic integrity amongst academic staff and students during timed assessments in their online courses.

The “Prevent going back to previous pages” feature in D2L for online timed quizzes and tests is an option that restricts students’ ability to review a test or quiz in its entirety or revise an answer on a question once it has passed. This feature is often enabled to help promote academic integrity in a timed assessment, however students are reporting that they are struggling with this restriction when it is enabled.

When students are only able to move forward in a linear fashion in an assessment it limits their ability to work on sections of a timed assessment of their choice, view previous answers, and change responses as needed. This restriction is one that many students are facing for the first time and does not allow them to apply common test-taking strategies that can help improve performance such as: reviewing the entire assessment first, answer questions where there is high-confidence first, then move to questions where there is more uncertainty, review the entire test to be sure all directions were appropriately followed, and all questions were answered before submitting.

Given the challenges presented with the “Prevent going back to previous pages” feature we recommended this feature not be utilized, and only used when absolutely necessary. It is not clear if preventing moving backwards promotes academic integrity, is contributing to increased test-taking stress for students and potentially compromising performance.