Randomizing questions in a quiz

Question randomization allows you to shuffle questions from all or a selected parts of your online quiz. This means that respondents are shown questions in a differing order each time the quiz is taken.

You can choose to randomize all questions or select a set number from the whole pool of questions in your test.

Benefits of this feature are:

• Discourages students from collaborating as they're less likely to be seeing the same questions at the same time, in the same order.
• Keeps respondents engaged when they're taking the quiz multiple times.
• Motivates respondents to think about the question, instead of memorizing the order of the answers.

Note: The FlexiQuiz system considers text and media items to be questions and so they'll be shuffled along with other selected questions.

This guide shows you how to set up question randomization by shuffling your questions or how to randomly pull a few questions.

How to set-up question randomization

1. Create your online test, quiz, exam, or assessment.
2. Select the Configure tab.
3. Choose General from the left-hand menu.
4. Scroll down the page and check the box Randomize Questions.
5. From the drop-down menu select your question randomization rules:

• Whole quiz - everything is shuffled. The box should say all to ensure all of your questions are shown to respondents in a random order.
• From page - only question and text/ media items from this page to the end of the test are shuffled.
• Set pages - list each page where you would like to randomize the items within that page. For example, all the questions on page 2 will be randomized. All the questions on page 6 will be randomized and all the items on page 10 will be shuffled.

Your question randomization is now set up. Finish configuring, publish, and share your quiz. As per the rules you've set, students will now see your questions in a different order every time your test is taken.

You'll still be able to analyze results using the Response summary as the FlexiQuiz system identifies each question.

How to randomly pull a few questions

This feature enables you to randomly pull a set number of questions from all the questions that are in your online quiz. If you're an Enterprise or Premium plan member you can also pool all the questions together from all of your questions and then pick from bank.

1. To start, you will need to create your quiz with your whole selection of questions. For example, 10 questions.
2. Go to the Configure tab and select General from the left-hand menu.
3. Scroll down the page and check the box named Randomize Questions.
4. Select Whole quiz from the drop-down menu.
5. In the box that currently says All - type in how many questions you would like to show to students. In this example, 2 questions out of a possible 10 questions will be shown to quiz takers.
6. Configure, Publish, and Share your test online.

Check out this example - the online math test we've created below has 10 questions, only 2 questions will be randomly shown each time the quiz is taken. Do you get the same questions every time you take the test?
Take randomize questions quiz

Top tip! If you're using the page time limits, the timing is applied to the page and not the question or text/ media item. For example, Question A could start on page 2 with a 1-minute time limit. However, after randomization is applied, question A is on page 6 with a 2-minute time limit.

It's not possible to apply a time limit to each question and use the randomize question feature.

Note! You can turn off the question randomization at any time. Just return to the Configure screen and un-check the box named Randomize questions.

Relevant help guides

Randomizing quiz questions from your question bank

Tips to minimize cheating using FlexiQuiz software

How to create your first MCQ quiz

Other quiz configuration options

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