Quizzes and assignments
Both live inside a topic, alongside its lessons, and both are created from the menu on the topic in the curriculum.
Quizzes
Quiz settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Title | What learners see |
| Order | Where it sits in the topic |
| Instructions | Shown before they start |
| Time limit | Minutes. 0 means unlimited |
| On timeout | Answers are auto-submitted. This is the only behaviour |
| Attempt limit | How many tries. 0 means unlimited |
| Final score | The best attempt counts. This is the only behaviour |
| Pass mark | The percentage needed to pass |
The two zeros catch people out. Zero is not "no time" or "no attempts" — it is "no limit".
Best score means a retake can only help a learner, which is usually the right incentive for a knowledge check. If you want a quiz where the first attempt is the one that counts, set the attempt limit to 1.
Question types
| Type | What it asks for |
|---|---|
| Multiple choice | One correct option from several |
| True / False | One of two |
| Short answer | Typed text |
| Numeric | A number, with an optional unit and tolerance |
Numeric tolerance is the field that saves you arguments. Set it and 3.14 passes for π; leave it and it does not.
Each question carries its own points, so questions need not be equal. The quiz total is the sum.
Each question can carry an explanation, shown after submission. Write them. They are the most valuable part of the results screen and the cheapest thing on this page to add — a learner who passed by guessing finds out from the explanation and nowhere else.
Questions can be reordered by dragging.
Two ways to make a quiz invisible
Worth knowing, because both look like a bug from the learner's side:
A quiz with no questions is not shown to learners at all. If a quiz is missing from a course, that is the first thing to check.
A quiz in an unpublished course is not shown either. Saving is not publishing.
Assignments
An assignment is work a learner builds and hands in for a person to mark.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Assignment title | What learners see |
| Order | Where it sits in the topic |
| Description | The brief: rich text, same editor as a lesson |
| Score | The maximum mark |
| Pass mark | The mark needed to pass |
| Rubric | The criteria the work is judged against |
Writing the brief
The brief is the contract. A reviewer marking someone down for a thing the brief did not ask for is a reviewer with an argument coming.
Worth including:
- what to build, specifically
- what to submit — repository, deployed URL, a file, or some combination
- what "done" looks like
- anything explicitly out of scope
Learners submit a repository link as the required field, with optional live and file URLs. If your assignment expects something other than a repository, say so in the brief, because the form does not.
Rubrics
A rubric is the list of things you will be looking for, published in advance.
You can pick an existing rubric or write a new one with a name and its criteria. Learners see it on the assignment page before they start.
Two reasons to write one for every assignment that carries real marks:
Consistency. Marks drift across a batch and across reviewers. A rubric is the only thing that pulls them back together.
It is teaching. A rubric tells a learner what good looks like while they can still act on it. Feedback after the fact tells them what good looked like.
Points, weights and the final grade
An assignment's Score is its own maximum, not its share of the course.
How much assignments are worth overall is set on the course's Grading tab, as a weight against quizzes and attendance. A 300-point assignment in a course where assignments are worth 45% contributes to that 45%, not 300 marks of anything.
See Grading submissions for how the two fit together.