Best Practice: Using Question Pools

Question Pools are a powerful feature which can bring complexity and variety to your courses. A Question Pool will pick a random selection of questions from a wider bank and omit the rest, making each learner's quiz different to their peers. 

Here's our best practice guidance to help you become confident in setting them up so you can get the most out of using them.

If you need help creating your Question Pool, see Setting up a Question Pool for more information.

Contents

1 When to use a Question Pool

2 Allowing users to re-attempt a quiz that is part of a Question Pool

3 Structuring your Question Pool

4 Calculating the Question Pool percentage

When to use a Question Pool

A Question Pool is best used when you need to offer a serious assessment that is less subject to being undermined by answer sharing between peers.

For example, if you need your learners to prove their knowledge for compliance reasons, a Question Pool can be a useful tool to ensure that learners are answering with their knowledge rather than memorizing a specific pathway or getting answers from others. 

Allowing users to re-attempt a quiz that is part of a Question Pool

While Question Pools can be re-attempted, we recommend that quizzes using Question Pools are built with the intention of the learner completing them in one sitting.

This is due to the way their shuffling behavior can change a learner's score when they leave and return to the course later.

In short, as the Question Pool re-shuffles, the learner's score may be changed based on the pages that have been revealed and omitted. Any pages that have already been scored and are omitted during a reshuffle will be excluded from the course's total score. If those pages are then revealed again as part of another reshuffle, their score value will be added back to the total. You can read more about how shuffling can impact a learner's score in Understanding Question Pool shuffling behaviour.

We also advise you to keep in mind that it is not possible to prevent a learner from leaving a course part-way through. 

Structuring your Question Pool

We recommend that you do not include the first page of your course or the first page of a chapter in your Question Pool as this will prevent the questions from being randomized.

You may want to consider having a splash page at the start of your course or chapter and then your questions if you are looking to create a very short course.

When linking your Question Pool pages, use the Next page automatic setting on your link buttons to ensure that your learners are navigating to the next available page in the sequence.

Calculating the Question Pool percentage

Each Question Pool is assigned a percentage which determines how many pages are revealed out of the total. For example, in a 50% Question Pool with 10 questions, the number of questions that will appear is 5 (as 50% of 10 = 5).

If a percentage is chosen where the number of questions cannot be divided into a whole number, then the resulting number of pages will always be rounded down to the nearest whole number. 

For example, if I create a 35% Question for 10 questions, the resulting number will be 3.5 (as 35% of 10 is 3.5).

This will be rounded down to 3 and so the learner will be shown 3 questions.

When working with Question Pools it is often easier to calculate the percentages if the amount of pages in the Question Pool is even.

Keep in mind, it is not possible to change the percentage of pages that you want to display once a Question Pool has been created so we advise that you plan out your Question Pool before you create it.