Quiz Questions One at a Time or All at Once?

[waz107]

For your quizzes and exams, do you typically present questions one at a time or all at once? What should I take into account when deciding between these two options?

[lph]

There are two reasons to recommend one question at a time. First, this appears to help students focus on questions. Second, deals with cheating. We had a few years with a different LMS that only presented all questions and students would scroll up and down until they had the same question as the person next to them. 

We still have students who open tabs and search but setting a timer appears to block most of that behavior. If a student does a search then they generally aren’t doing well anyway. I allow students to retake exams as many times as they wish. Since we are pulling from a large bank of questions, we build practice sets. We also rely heavily on formula questions so that students don’t memorize answers. 

A final recommendation is to Google answers as a teacher. I love to take a question that can be found and invert things from answers in a search. For example, having the affirmative and the “not” version in the banks. At least some form of thinking has to happen.

Best of luck. 

[thompsli]

The biggest advantage of having all questions on one page is that it makes it simpler to make a print or pdf version of the quiz. Since I use Canvas for short 5-ish question auto-graded "homework" assignment quizzes, I find that useful for the occasional situation where I need to give a student printed instead of online homework for some reason. In a situation where you didn't want it to be easy to print out a quiz, the reverse would be true.

In general, I think with short quizzes it makes sense to keep them all on one page, but longer ones it's probably best to break them up. In a different LMS with more options, I used to group 5 questions per page on longer tests to keep things chunked into non-overwhelming pieces without requiring quite as many clicks as one question per page ends up with.