Test question groups (formerly categories)

Introduction

Questions can be organised into question groups, that can be set up to suit several different workflows:

• Organise your questions by topic or difficulty, without affecting how the test is presented to students
• Build a question bank with random selection of questions for each student, ensuring the same distribution of topics or difficulty for all students
• Present a small group of questions along with a common introduction, separated from other questions in the test

The basic rule is that all students will have the same number of questions, and all students will have the same maximum total score. This is the primary reason that some changes are not allowed after someone started the test.

To make it easier to get started with tests, the question group tab is not visible until the test is actually created. However if you want to use question groups, we do recommend you set those up before you start adding questions, as it makes it easier to assign a group to each question.

In the question group tab, you can add, edit and delete groups.

If you add a new group or click on an existing group, a new page is opened with options for the group.

Features

Each group needs to have a title, and we recommend keeping the title as short as possible for the best overview. This title is never visible to students, it is meant for the teacher only as a reference.

In addition there are several options available when you set up or edit a question group:

• Show all questions in this group on one page (off by default)
• Randomly select a subset of the questions for each student (this also requires you to set a score to be used for each question in the group) (off by default)
• Write an introduction text that belongs to the entire group, to be displayed along with each question.

Show all questions from a group on one page

When "Display group on one page" is enabled, all the questions from that group will be displayed on a separate page as students navigate through the test. The place of this group within the test as it is presented to a student is determined by the FIRST question in the group to be used for that student. 

Nice to know

• This is not intended to be used in combination with the option to display the entire test on one page. We do not prevent this, but we also do not recommend it.
• If "Randomly select questions" is enabled, in particular in combination with the question order being set to random, it will be hard for the teacher to predict where in the navigation order the group will appear.

Randomly select questions

This was previously called "Draw questions".

You can set up the test to randomly select a given number of questions from each group every time someone starts the test. When you enable this option, you will see two inputs: Number of questions to select, and Score per question. This is great for practice tests, and also one of several tools available for the teacher to reduce the chances of cheating. 

You can set the number of questions to select to any positive integer. If the number is equal to or higher than the number of questions assigned to the group, all questions are used.

If you want to use only a subset of questions for each test in this way, you also need to set a score for each question. This is to ensure that all the questions in a group have the same score, so everyone taking the test will have the same max score. If not, the results calculation and statistics will break down.

Question group introduction text

It is possible to create an "Introduction text" for a group, which will be displayed for the students when taking the test. 

You can think of this as a new step towards making the old paper tests digital. A typical math test for secondary school would often contain a description of a scenario such as prices changing or how a function and corresponding graph models fluctuations in temperature, and then questions a), b), c) etc which all relate to that scenario. The introduction text is where you would put that description, and the questions in the group are all the sub-questions you would normally assign with a), b), c) etc.

Migration from "categories" - changes

With the redesign and renaming of the categories into question groups, there are a few minor changes worth noticing, although they have very little impact.

Number of questions to draw cannot be zero

It is no longer possible to set "0" as the number of questions to draw. When data is migrated to the new functionality, groups with this value set to 0 will have the option for randomly selecting questions disabled. This means the group will behave in exactly the same way as before, using all questions.

More flexibility in question order

The teacher can now choose between Random and Normal question order, even if only a subset of questions are used. Normal means we follow the order in the question list as seen by the teacher. Random means we mix all the questions (across groups). 

More flexibility in score

The score of a question is locked only in the case of enabling random selection and using only a subset of the group. This is to ensure that all students have the same max score they can achieve. For pre-existing data (categories) the score is kept as it was for each question, but we now allow editing the score unless random selection is used.

Question score vs score in a group: What to expect when making changes