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Overview

The following will walk through the process of creating quiz-style questions from training materials.These questions will be created via a template and placed into a pool of questions for use testing the knowledge of future employees on the related subject area. 

Best Practice

Create questions that are tough, but fair. You might find yourself faced with similar questions, or even your own, at some point.

Table of Contents

Complete the Training

Whether it is a video, a document, an instructor-led course or some other format, fully satisfying the course expectations and absorbing all of the material is the first step towards creating great content based upon it.

Best Practice

Take notes early and often. The more material you have to work with once the training is complete, the easier it will be to create a list of questions in both great quality and great quantity.

 

Get the Template

The following Excel file provides a template for training material-based question creation.

QuestionTemplate.xlsx

 

Understand the Template Fields

General Fields

QID

Description

The QID or Question ID is a unique value to identify the question within the spreadsheet. This field should already be populated for you.

Example Value

0

Submitter

Description

This is you, the user submitting the question. Select your name from the drop-down list.

Example Value

Mark Chadbourne

Course Fields

Fields pertaining to the course from which the question is derived.

Site

Description

What site is the material from? 

Example Value

www.practice.com

Name

Description

What is the name of the course this question is derived from?

Example Value

Awesome Questions in 5 Easy Steps

URL

Description

What is the specific URL that will take me directly to the course content (not just the site it's hosted on)?

Example Value

www.practice.com/awesome

Tag Fields

Fields that help to categorize and describe the question for future lookup.

Discipline

Description

Is this content Professional (e.g. business-, conduct- or communication-related) or Technical (anything else)

Valid Values

Professional, Technical

Category

Description

Provide a single word or phrase describing the high-level category the content falls under.

Best Practice

Keep categories consistent. If a Languages category has already been created, don't create a Programming Languages category - re-use existing labels that apply to your content first and only create new ones when necessary.

Example Value

Communication

Subject

Description

Provide a lower-level categorization further defining this content. Within the realm of the Category you just defined, what 

Example Value

Questioning

Difficulty

Applicability

 

 

It's OK to focus specifically on the source training, but steer clear of opinions and be sure to set the Applicability field to Course.

Question Fields

Type

Question

Hint

Answers

Explanation

Example Question

The following illustrates an example question created with the template and defined utilizing the fields and examples described above. Underlined text denotes a user input field constrained to a defined list of drop-down values; all remaining fields are freeform text.

 

  CourseTagsQuestion
QIDSubmitterSiteNameURLDisciplineCategorySubjectDifficultyApplicabilityType  
0Mark Chadbournewww.practice.comAwesome Questions in Five Easy Stepswww.practice.com/awesomeProfessionalCommunicationQuestioningBeginnerGeneralMultiple SelectQuestionWhat qualities should an awesome question have?
HintSometimes an optional hint might be a good thing to include…
Answer 1It should test concepts rather than memorization
Answer 2It should not be easily answered by a Google search
Answer 3It should be tagged with appropriate data to categorize it
Answer 4It should be based on the opinion of the person writing the question
Answer 5It should provide any necessary context to answer it properly
Correct Answer(s)1,2,3,5
ExplanationAn awesome question should have all of the qualities necessary to properly test a candidate's knowledge. It should NOT focus too narrowly on terminology or opinions specific to training source material.

 

Follow Best Practices

A good question should be aligned with each of the following best practices.

Best Practices

  • Be sure to completely fill out each field of the template for each question
  • Test understanding/concepts over memorization (e.g. the difference between knowing how to multiply rather than simply knowing the times tables)
  • Inject practical situations framing key concepts wherever possible; it should not be possible to answer a question with the first page of Google search results
  • Provide proper context; if a question is best posed with an accompanying code snippet or other artifact, include one
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