Fixing Problematic Quiz Questions

  • Moodle version(s): 3.x, 4.x
  • Last updated: September 23, 2022
  • By: Amy Spielmaker

Before You Start

Before starting on this guide, answer these questions:

  • (A) Have students taken the quiz?
    • If no: Then you can just fix the question. Follow the steps for editing quiz questions.
    • If yes: proceed to (B) below.
  • (B) Is the problem something that’s affecting students’ scores?
    • If no (e.g. if there’s a typo): Follow the steps for editing quiz questions.
    • If yes: Continue with this guide.

Problem: The wrong answer is marked as correct

  1. Follow the steps for editing quiz questions. When you get to the question editing page:
    • To mark the correct answer as correct, change the “Grade” dropdown to 100%.
    • Set the “Grade” dropdown for all the other answers (i.e. the choices that are incorrect) to 0%.
  2. Save the question and follow the steps for regrading a quiz.

Problem: More than one of the answer choices are actually correct

  1. Follow the steps for editing quiz questions. When you get to the question editing page:
    • Make sure the “One or multiple answers” dropdown is set to One answer only.
    • Find the answer choice(s) that are correct and change the “Grade” dropdown on these to 100%.
  2. Save the question and follow the steps for regrading a quiz.

Problem: None of the answer choices are actually correct

This is a trickier situation because there’s not going to be a good way to regrade students automatically. The first thing you want to do is get the bad question out of the pool of possible questions (assuming your quiz is pulling questions randomly from the question bank).

  1. Make a copy of the question to correct:
    1. Go to your question bank and find the problematic question.
    2. Click the Edit dropdown, then select Duplicate. This will create a copy of the question and open it’s editing page.
    3. On the editing page of the duplicated question, fix the question by adding the correct answer. Make sure to change the “Grade” dropdown on the correct answer to 100% and, for all the other answers (i.e. the choices that are incorrect), change the “Grade” dropdown to 0%.
    4. Save the question.
  2. Remove the original (incorrect) quiz question from circulation by deleting it:
    1. In the question bank, find the original question. You can distinguish it from the corrected question based on the “Created by” date.
    2. Click the Edit dropdown and select Delete. It will ask if you are sure you want to delete and something about the question already being used in a quiz. Confirm that you want to delete the question.
  3. Follow the instructions for manually regrading quizzes.

Problem: I need to change the question type

For example, let’s say you have a question setup as a short answer question type and you want to change it to a multiple choice question type.

  1. Remove the original (incorrect) quiz question from circulation by deleting it:
    1. First make sure you copy the question text somewhere so you can paste it into a new question.
    2. In the question bank, find the original question.
    3. Click the Edit dropdown and select Delete. It will ask if you are sure you want to delete and something about the question already being used in a quiz. Confirm that you want to delete the question.
  2. Follow the instructions for creating a question bank question to add a new question with your desired question type. Assuming you copied the question text from the old question, you can just paste it into the new question. Make sure the question bank category you add the new question to is the same category as the old question.
  3. Follow the instructions for manually regrading quizzes.

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