5 essential tips for quiz making

Are you getting into quiz making? Perhaps you’re doing it because you’re preparing an exam for your students, or maybe you want to screen potential new employees during a hiring process.

Whatever the case may be, quiz making is something that can have a lot of depth to it. While presenting a list of questions to someone and assessing their answers doesn’t sound terribly hard, constructing a truly effective quiz is an art form unto itself.

This is why special people are employed to prepare exams for schools/universities etc. If you want to be truly effective with your quiz making, read the following tips!

Find the right number of questions

Of course, there is no universal rule for how many questions you should incorporate when quiz making. Different assessments require different levels of depth to accurately assess someone’s knowledge of a subject.

For example, 7 questions could be perfect for assessing someone’s general knowledge of coffee-making but could prove inadequate when determining their knowledge of ancient Egyptian history.

Whatever amount of questions you feel are necessary, it’s a good idea to start with preparing double that amount (if you have 7 questions, write 14). This will allow you to eliminate the questions you feel aren’t as strong.

Don’t make it too obvious

When you are quiz making, you should ensure that your questions and answers are not so obvious that someone could fluke their way through it without actually studying the subject. If your question has 4 possible answers and 3 of them are obviously wrong, then the question is not as effective as it could be.

It’s best to have a spread of questions that all sound similar and actually require the person to think critically to answer it. While the other 3 responses may be obviously wrong to an expert like you, they may not seem obvious at all to the person you are trying to assess.

Don’t make them too complex

If you are making a quiz, you are likely doing it to get quick results. If the questions are going to be timed, then you can’t throw in anything too complex which would require a long period of thinking to solve. An easy way to get started is Fyrebox with their free account.

For more in-depth assessments, essays or other long-form writing tasks are generally required. If you make a question too lengthy, then someone who has the knowledge may fail simply because they were overwhelmed and not given enough time to think of their response.

Use general examples

When quiz making, if you are using an example scenario to assess someone’s knowledge, make sure that it is general enough that anyone can interpret it. If you use too many niche terms, then someone who has adequate knowledge might be thrown off.

For example, if you are asking about how someone would approach a car repair and use a highly specific or unusual car brand, it may end up being a poor question. It would be better to simply ask them about a general car (such as using the term sports car instead of Ferrari).

Have fun with it

A lot of people enjoy quiz making just for the fun of it, and there are plenty of websites online that specialise in delivering quizzes for people to take recreationally. Some of these are designed to produce a humorous or interesting result that people will share on social media, which brings others to the site and exposes them to advertising.

If you are quiz making in this context, then the quality of questions will still be important in keeping people engaged so that they complete the quiz and share their result. In many cases, there won’t be any wrong answer, they will simply produce a different result based on the answers given.

For example, a quiz that was designed to tell someone what kind of wizard they are is not really going to have wrong answers. This is where quiz making becomes a form of entertainment rather than academic or professional assessment.

As you can see, quiz making is something that can be pretty complex, depending on what your goals are. If you are trying to seriously assess someone’s knowledge and get sincere answers, then you will need to think a little harder about the questions you pose to respondents.

 

Tina Johnson helped bring The Marketing Folks from a-weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. She continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a contributor to The Marketing Folks, Tara mainly covers industry new.