Now we will look at the test to see what we have. The first thing we notice is that all the questions are shuffled. This is not what we want. We need to have the descriptions first, to explain to the students what they need to do. We have two options for what to do here.
The first option is simple. We can Update Quiz and turn off the Shuffle function. If we do this, the questions will be placed exactly as they appear in the Questions in this quiz area. This option is easy and is the fastest way to deal with this issue. The drawback is that every student will have the test given in the exact same order, which may increase cheating. On the upside, the responses inside the answers are shuffled, so some variation is still included in the test.
The second option takes extra time, but the effort can we worth it. We will still be turning off the shuffle function, but we'll be settingup additonal categories from which to draw random questions.
First, we will turn off the shuffle question order feature in the Quiz setup page. Then, we will go to the Edit tab above the Question Bank and click on the Categories link directly below the Edit tab. Once inside Edit Categories, we will see a list of all the categories related to this Quiz that we have so far.
We will scroll down to the bottom and we see the Add category area. In the Parent drop-down menu, we are going to select Default for General Science Test because we want the create a subcategory for this quiz. For Name, we will enter General Science ExamTrue/False Introduction. We will enter the same information for Category Info. Once these steps are complete, we will click on the Add category button, located below the Category Info textbox. The new category will appear as a subcategory in the Default for General Science Test category. We will do this for each of the other question types we have.
Now that we have created our categories, we will add our questions to their appropriate categories. Once the questions have been added to their categories, we need to go to the Category drop-down menu just below the Question Bank header and select the category we want to use. We will begin by selecting T/F Questions about Space. This will bring us to the questions we just added to the category. Now, we want to add these questions to the exam in a random order. We go to the bottom of the Quiz Bank and we can see Add 'X' random questions with an Add button on the right-hand side. We select the number of items we want to move, click on the Add button, and that number of randomly selected items from the category selected will be placed in the test. We will manually move them to where they need to be and repeat the process for each of the other categories we will be using. When we finish adding the random questions we see this screen in the Quiz:
What this quiz will do is select five random items from the related category. However, if there are only five items in the category, the items will always be in the same order. You should include at least one additional item to allow for true variation in the questions. While more options for variation are probably better, one thing to consider is the item quality. Are all the items in the category of equal quality or difficulty? In case you are reviewing items and you find some are significantly more or less difficult, you may want to consider removing them to improve the test's validity.