Quizzes in Google Forms - Kim Williams

Quick, put all your Scantrons back in the English office!  You don’t have to find a key, make a new key, put finished Scantrons in order, and stand in front of the machine to feed them one at a time with Google Forms!

Google has added a new feature that allows a form to grade itself with no extensions or add-ons.  If you have short answer and/or essay answers along with multiple choice, you can do that in forms, too, but you will need an add-on called Flubaroo-more on that in a later post.

Creating a form is easy!

I like to start a new Google Form by going to the folder in my Drive where I want it to live and then clicking “New” and “Google Form.”  

Save yourself time if you will be making more than one quiz this year by creating your first one to be your “Quiz Template.”  This will have questions for collecting identifying information.  Then, for every quiz you make, open your quiz template, make a copy of it and start from there.  This way you don’t have to do the personal info questions again and again.  Mine looks like this:

It’s pretty self-explanatory from here as far as setting up your questions.

To get it to be a quiz that will grade itself, simply click on the settings icon that looks like a gear next to the send button. Click “Quizzes.”  Slide the button next to “Make this a quiz.”  Select how you want the grade released.  I suggest “later” for a few reasons the most important of which is to avoid one period forwarding the answers to another period.  

A couple of Google Form Tips

Google Forms has a few annoying idiosyncrasies.  Hopefully, Google will update these features soon.

Sharing

If you want to share one with another teacher, make a copy first and share that.  They should make a copy, but if they don’t, then it won’t affect yours.  Unlike Docs, it won’t let you share “view only” in forms in a way that is useful to other teachers.  They end up getting the form to respond rather than edit.

Organizing in Drive

Google Forms are also harder to organize in Drive than Docs.  So, if you are starting with your quiz template or with a new form, immediately after you title it, go to your drive, search for it, and drag it to the folder where you want it.  It will make your life easier later when you can’t find it and don’t know what you titled it.

All set! So long Scantrons!