How to create a quiz in Google Forms

If you need to make quizzes for your students, you probably already know that Google Forms is a great way to do that. Most people already have a Google account, so it’s easy to get started. And, like most of Google’s basic tools, it’s free.

On top of that, Google has a few special features to make grading quizzes easier.

This article will show you everything you need to know to create a quiz in Google Forms, as well as one or two tricks you might not have picked up on yourself.

Creating the quiz

Getting started is easy. First, go to forms.google.com. Under Start a new form, click the big + button to open a blank form.

You should now be looking at a new, untitled form. First, let’s make sure that Google Forms knows that this is a quiz and not a generic form. 

Click on the Settings tab, then toggle the Make this a quiz button to the on position.

Next, enable the Collect email addresses option and set your quiz to Limit to 1 response. Enabling those two settings will reduce the possibility of cheating.

From the Settings tab, you can enable automatic grading to show your students their score immediately. Or you can disable that option if, for example, you’re grading on a curve.

The Settings section also gives you other options for what the respondent can see — such as the point value of each question. Again, you can disable any of these if you don’t think they’re relevant.

Now that you’ve configured your quiz, click back to the Questions tab. You’ll see an Untitled Form field with an email collection field. Click on the form title and enter the name of your quiz.

You can also add a description of the quiz under the title. The email field is for your students to fill out.

Adding questions

Start the quiz by asking for the student’s name. Their email may be enough to identify them, but you might as well save yourself the headache of having to cross-reference everyone’s names and email addresses. Add a new question by clicking the circled + in the side menu.

Now use the dropdown menu in the new question to change the question type to Short answer, then change the question text to First Name. Make sure that you set this field to Required.

To add a field for the student’s last name, the easiest method is to duplicate the First Name field. (If you just click the add button again, you’ll have to repeat the same steps because Google Forms defaults to a multiple-choice format for new questions.)

You can duplicate the question by clicking on the icon at the bottom of the question box.

Everything in the new question should be exactly the same. All you have to do is change the question text from First Name to Last Name.

Now you can start adding quiz questions. There should already be an untitled multiple-choice question in your form. If not, click the Add question button and choose Multiple choice from the dropdown menu. Then enter your question.

Next, click on Option 1 and enter your first answer choice. When you’re done, hit Enter to add another answer.

You can even add an image by clicking the photo icon to the right of the answer field. For the following example, the images are from the Google Image Search tab.

When you’re done adding your answer choices, you can rearrange them by dragging and dropping them using the six-dot icon on the left. You can remove questions and/or their images by clicking the X icons. You can also manually rearrange questions with the six-dot icon at the top of the question box.

You might want to use the Shuffle option order feature as another way to prevent cheating. To select this option, click the three dot icon in the bottom right of the question box.

When you’ve set up your question, you can duplicate it or click Add question to add a new one.

Weighting and grading

Now, let’s teach Google Forms which answer is right and how to score the quiz. Start by clicking the Answer key link on the bottom of a question.

From here, you can set the correct answer and assign a point value to each question. You don’t have to assign all your questions the same point value. You can give harder questions more weight by making them worth more points.

The Add answer feedback button at the bottom lets you interact with your students as they take the quiz. You can add different responses for correct and incorrect answers. For example, you can give them a word of encouragement for correct answers and a link to more information or a video for incorrect ones to reinforce the lesson.

After you’ve added all of the answers to your questions, you can preview your quiz to make sure everything looks right by clicking the eye icon in the upper-right corner. You can also take your own quiz to give you some sample data.

When you’re done filling out your quiz in the preview tab, click back to the form builder tab. Now select the Responses tab at the top of the form.

There are three sub-tabs in the Responses tab. The Summary tab will give you an analysis of the overall quiz results.

The Question tab will show you how your students answered each question. It will help you see which, if any, subjects your students are struggling with. The Individual tab will let you drill down to see how each student did.

In the upper-right corner of the page, there’s a green spreadsheet icon next to the three-dot icon. That button will let you export all of your data to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. You can use the spreadsheet to calculate a grading curve using your quiz data or otherwise manage your data.

Consider other options

As you can tell, Google Forms offers a lot of powerful tools to help you create and manage quizzes. But it can’t do everything. So if you ever find yourself looking for features that it doesn’t offer, you might want to check out Jotform.

Jotform can do everything Google Forms can do just as easily. But Jotform has more options, including fill in the blank and number field answer options, to name a few.

It’s easy to get started with Jotform. Just use our quiz maker or customize an existing quiz template.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels