Most of the effort in an online MCQ test for class is not the technology. It is deciding what you are actually testing, writing options that discriminate between students who know the material and students who don't, and then getting thirty people into the same quiz without losing five minutes of the lesson.
This is the whole process, start to finish, with the parts that usually go wrong called out. It assumes nothing except a computer, phone or tablet and a class with devices or a projector.
Before you open anything: write the questions
Drafting inside an app is slower than drafting on paper or in a notes file, because every question makes you stop and fill in fields. Write the list first. For a twenty-minute check, ten to fifteen multiple choice questions is a realistic length.
Three habits make MCQs worth marking:
- One idea per question. If a student can get it wrong for two different reasons, the result tells you nothing about which one.
- Make the wrong options plausible. Distractors should be the mistakes your class actually makes. An option nobody would pick is not an option, it is padding.
- Watch the accidental giveaways. The longest option, the only grammatically matching one, and "all of the above" are all guessable without the knowledge.
Mix in a couple of written short answers if you want to see reasoning. They cost more to mark, but not as much as people assume — see why a spelling mistake should not cost a student marks for how to keep that cheap.
Step 1: build the quiz
With Quizoma you build the quiz in your browser with Quizoma Studio or in the Android app; participants take it on any device.
Start a new quiz, give it a title, and add your questions one at a time — or import them from
a plain .txt or .csv file if you already keep a question bank. The
importer covers single choice, multiple correct and true/false, which is most of an MCQ
paper. The free quiz templates include a
science MCQ quiz in exactly that format, and the
free MCQ test maker page has a worked example.
Each question carries a format. There are six to choose from: single choice (the standard MCQ), multiple correct with partial credit, true/false, written short answer, fill in the blanks, and a poll that is not scored at all. You can mix all six inside one quiz, so an MCQ test with two written questions at the end is a normal thing to build rather than a compromise. The full list of question types has the details.
On the default limits, a quiz holds up to twenty questions and an account holds up to ten quizzes, which is enough for a term of topic checks if you delete the ones you have finished with.
Step 2: decide how strictly answers are matched
Pure MCQ needs no decision here — an option is selected or it isn't. The moment you add a written question, though, you have to say what counts as correct: exact text, case-sensitive exact, typo-tolerant, keyword coverage, or numeric equivalence. A question can carry several rules and accept whichever one fires.
This is the setting that decides whether a student who wrote Pythagorus loses a mark for a slip of the thumb. An answer that satisfies none of the rules is marked wrong, so if a question is really a judgement call, switch the whole quiz to manual marking instead and score it yourself. There is a worked breakdown on typo-tolerant grading, including when to turn the tolerance off.
Step 3: share it with a code or a QR
When the quiz is ready, Quizoma generates a 6-character quiz code and a matching QR code. That is the entire invitation. There is no class list to build, no email addresses to collect, and nothing for students to set up in advance.
In practice:
- Write the code on the board. It survives a projector that won't connect and a link that won't load, and a student who drops off the network can rejoin from it.
- Put the QR on the screen for the half of the room that would rather point a camera than type.
- Stagger the join. Ask half the class to join, wait fifteen seconds, then the rest. Thirty devices hitting the network in the same ten seconds is what makes school Wi-Fi look broken.
Step 4: what students do
Students go to quizoma.com/take in whatever browser is already on their phone, laptop or Chromebook, enter the code, and sign in with their Google account so the answers can be attributed to a real person. There is nothing to install and no separate password to invent. Students with the app can scan the QR instead.
Questions arrive one at a time on a layout built for a phone held in one hand. Each answer is written to the device the moment it is given and synced afterwards, so a connection that drops mid-test is an inconvenience rather than a lost lesson. Joining is the one step that does need the network, which is why it is worth getting everyone in while things are working — there is more on that in running a class quiz when the Wi-Fi is unreliable.
The participants screen lists who has joined and who has submitted, refreshed each time you open it, and your phone gets a notification as people join and hand in — so you can tell whether the room needs another two minutes without walking around it.
Step 5: read the results
The paper is scored the moment a student submits — multiple choice, true/false, multiple correct with its partial credit, and written answers against the rules you set. Nothing queues.
That is the point at which it is worth reading the written answers rather than the totals. The ones that were close, unusual, or better than your model answer are the interesting ones, and you can open any submission to change a mark you disagree with and leave a comment so the student understands the score. If you would rather the quiz waited for you from the start, turn manual marking on before you share it and nothing is scored automatically.
Then export the whole thing as a PDF report — scores, per-question breakdown, every answer and your comments — to file, print or send home. The per-question view is the part worth actually reading: a question that two-thirds of the class got wrong is usually a teaching note rather than a run of bad luck, and occasionally it is a badly written question.
What it costs
Nothing, today. Every feature is free to use, there is no per-seat pricing, and students see no advertising while they are answering. The honest limits are the ones above: twenty questions in a quiz and ten quizzes on an account by default. You can create quizzes in your browser with the online quiz maker, Quizoma Studio (currently in beta), or in the Android app.
A realistic time budget
For a fifteen-question topic check: twenty minutes writing the questions properly, five minutes putting them into Quizoma, a few seconds sharing the code, the length of the test itself, and two or three minutes on whatever written answers came back. The second time you run that topic, the first twenty minutes are already done.
If you want to try the flow end to end, Quizoma is free and the quickest way in is how Quizoma works.