Creating and editing question sources

Step-by-step instructions on how to create and edit question sources within the question groups in a block, for an exam

This article describes how you can set up question sources within the question groups in a block for an exam, in your biz:Examiner authoring environment.

There are different options for how you can create a new exam. In either option, the ‘Exam structure’ is one of the steps to define the structure of the exam. In the exam structure, you start with creating and using the blocks to configure the settings for the questions, or for the question groups. Please see Create a new exam to get started with creating an exam.

About the question sources

Within each block in an exam module, you can organize a set of questions into question groups. Each question group can have different questions that are available in this authoring environment, in the ‘Questions’ navigation topics. To know about the exam structure, blocks, and question groups, please see Setup exam structure. To know about questions, please see Add a new question.

Select the ‘Exam Structure’ tab. When you create a new exam by using the button ‘new exam’ on top of exam topics, one block is created automatically for you to get started. This block shows a default question group and the question source that you selected while creating the exam.

Since the exam structure enables you to organize the hierarchy in blocks, question groups, and question sources, you can plan the logical structure before you add or edit the question sources. For example, if you have a block for specific type of questions based on subject, the participants’ segment, or the grade level, set up the blocks and then question groups accordingly, and the right naming conventions so that you can set up the right question sources in the right question groups, and in the right blocks.

The changes in the question source settings apply only to the current question source that you open for its settings. To set up the same settings for other question sources, you need to define and configure the settings for those question sources either within the question group, in the same block, or in a different block, by following the same steps.

Set up question source settings

Click on the ‘Settings’ icon for the target question source name. The ‘Edit question source’ dialog box opens.

Owner

In ‘Owner’ the default owner of your biz:Examiner account is selected. Depending on the permissions in your biz:Examiner account, you may see other owners listed in this drop-down. You can select an owner to see the associated topics in the ‘Topics’ drop-down list, for the question source. When you select another owner, you will see only the non-protected topics of this owner.

Note: The option to select an owner is not available if no other owner is added to your biz:Examiner account.

Topics

In ‘Topic’, you can see the topic structure only for the selected owner. Select a topic as the source of questions in this question group. You can add more question sources within the same question group.

If you select a topic that has one or more internal topics or subtopics, you get options to customize the question source for the sub-topics, as explained below.

Selection types

For the selected topic for this question source, you have different options to select the actual questions.

Select ‘Select all questions’ to select and share all the questions from the selected topic, with the participants.
Select ‘Randomly select questions’ to select a random number of questions from the selected topic. When you select this option, the ‘Number of questions’ field appears. Write the number of questions that you want to actually share in the exam, randomly, from the topic that you selected in the ‘Topic’ drop-down.
Select ‘Manually select questions’ to select the questions manually, from the selected topic. When you select this topic, the ‘Questions’ drop-down appears where you can see the list of all the questions from the selected topic. The selected questions are shown as added to this field, and you can remove any selected question, if required.

Include questions from sub-topics

This option is enabled by default. It works differently for the ‘Select type’ that you select in the previous step.

Select all questions

When you select ‘Select all questions’, you see the ‘Subtopic selection type’ settings. The options are:

Include all subtopics: Select this option to include all the sub-topics of the selected topic. It means all the questions of all the subtopics are available in the exam, for this particular question group, in this block.
Include random number of direct subtopics: Select this option to include a random number of direct subtopics of the selected topic, in the exam. When you select it, the ‘Number of subtopics’ field appears. Write the number of subtopics that you want to include from this topic, randomly, for this exam.

Randomly select questions

In this selection type, there is an additional setting available as ‘Include random number of questions from each direct subtopic’. Since the topic select type enables random selection of topics, you can enable this option to enable the random selection of the number of questions from each subtopic as well.

Manually select questions

Since this topic selection type enables you to select the questions manually, the ‘Include questions from subtopics’ setting is not available in this case.

Shuffle answers

Enable this option to shuffle the answering options within each question. This setting applies to all the questions in this question source.

Save the question source settings

Click on ‘Save’ to save the question source settings.

Set up the order of question sources within the question group

When you see the list of question sources within a question group, there is an option to set up their order of appearance in the exam, for the participants. Take the mouse pointer over any question source and the directional arrows are available, as below.

The first question source at the top shows the down arrow only. Click on it to move the question source one step down in the list.
All other question sources except the last one in the list show two arrows – one each to move the question source up or down respectively. Use these as required.
The last question source in the list shows the up arrow only. Click on it to move the question source one step up in the list.

Add new question source

You can add new question groups in any block, anytime.

In any question group, click on ‘Add question source’.
The ‘New question source’ dialog box opens.
In ‘Topic’, select the topic as the question source from the questions selected for this question group, in this block.
Click on ‘Create’ to create and save it.

In the question group, you can see that this new question source is listed now. You can define custom settings and configuration of this new question source as explained in this article.