How to import questions for a quiz or test

Tired of typing? Got a 50-item quiz or test? Why not simply import your questions from a quiz or test you made previously? Here's how! First, head to the Resources/Data tab and choose 'Question Bank':

Now, I suggest you create a new folder to put your questions into by clicking 'New Folder' and naming it appropriately:

Open that folder, and choose 'Smart Import' here from the last option:

That will take you to this page, where you click the big 'Smart Import from Word' button:

When you click that button, it will prompt you to choose a Word document from your computer. Choose the test or quiz you want to import, but you should know a few rules first!

The importer may be smart, but it's still pretty finicky, so the easiest way to proceed is to copy your test into a new document and strip out anything problematic:

1. It's looking for anything in an outline like this:

   1. I'm a question

      1. Answer A

      2. Answer B

      3. Answer C
         

2. It hates text boxes -- in my experimentation, having a few questions in text boxes just stopped the importer dead. Get rid of 'em.
   

3. It only supports its normal question types (obviously), so it won't be able to process a big matching section, since the platform doesn't do matching, just multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short answer (anything that doesn't look like the first two will be entered as short answer).
   

4. It will pull in images and make them part of questions!
   

5. It will note the correct answer for each one if you put the answer(s) at the end of the question in capital letters, either in parentheses or underlined. It should look something like this:
   
   

So once you've got your test ready and hit 'go', you'll see something like this -- choose the confirming option on the right:

You're ready to put them in your quiz!

Putting Imported Questions In a Quiz or Test

Open up a new quiz or test to edit, just as you normally would (see How to make a quiz/test you need help). Then, choose 'Select from Question Bank' on the right:

Confirm your course, and select the folder you want to choose questions from (the folder you imported your questions into in the first place). You'll see your list of imported questions like this!

Tick the box beside those you want to import (you can also tick 'Choose All' at the bottom) and hit confirm:

You'll be taken back to your quiz, where you now have a lovely list of questions! Go through them to make sure you didn't meet any hiccups, and your quiz will be ready to go!

NB: The question picker is sometimes kind of weird; in my experiments, about half the time it worked great, and the other half of the time, I had to unselect and reselect, or pick questions from the question bank more than once before they would take. One time it had four copies of my first question. But for a 30-question test, it's defininitely WAY faster
than doing it manually!