How to create a quiz in Google Forms

Being a teacher is no easy feat. Between curating lesson plans, managing students, and staying connected with coworkers, you’ve got a lot on your plate.

That’s why when it comes to making quizzes, you need a tool that works perfectly every time. Something simple to use, yet powerful enough to handle the more advanced assignments.

Many teachers reach for Google Forms as the solution, and for good reason. It’s free, relatively easy to use, and available to anyone with a Google account. But once you start building your quiz, the rosy glasses might fade. Set up is tricky, customisation options are limited, and the grading features are basic.

🤯 New to Google Forms? Check out our ultimate guide to Google Forms to become a pro in no time.

How to Create a Quiz in Google Forms in 5 Steps

In this guide, we’ll break down how to create, grade, and share online quizzes in Google Forms, and offer a more holistic, versatile alternative.

1. Make your form a quiz

First things first: open up Google Forms and select a blank form to get started. Name your quiz and adjust the privacy settings to your liking.

To turn your form into a quiz, click the settings tab and toggle on make this a quiz. When your form is a quiz, you can select correct answers and assign point values for your questions. You can create a self-grading quiz or grade them manually.

2. Add questions

Time for the meat and potatoes. Select add question from the pop-up toolbar on the right side of the editor. You can add as many questions as you like and split them into sections by category.

Google Forms has ten question types available in the dropdown menu, and only six of them are relevant as quiz questions.

3. Assign answers and point values

To assign correct answers and point values, select the answer key icon. Simply click on the correct answer, add the point value at the top, and click done. To set multiple correct answers, all you have to do is check all the true answer options.

You can also choose to add answer feedback. This allows you to offer prewritten messages to students when they answer either correctly or incorrectly.

While you can prevent students from gaining points when they click an incorrect answer, there’s no way to subtract points for wrong answers.

Complete this process for all of your questions. You can check your total points tally at the top right corner of the form editor and adjust your question values accordingly.

4. Adjust your grading settings

You can hop into the settings tab to decide when you’d like your quiz graded, who can view the scores, and how you’d like the responses collected.

For this example, we want our quiz to be graded immediately, and we’d like the score to be shared with the students. To do this, select Immediately after each submission under Release grades. If you don’t want your students to view their grades, select Later, after manual review.

You can also decide if you’d like to collect respondents' email addresses, send them a copy of their quiz responses, or allow them to alter their responses after submission.

To avoid cheating and encourage fairness, we suggest toggling on Limit to 1 response and Shuffle question order.

5. Share your form

Once your settings are to your liking, go ahead and click send. To allow anyone to take your quiz, be sure to toggle off restrict to users in your organisation.

You can share your quiz as an email, via direct link, or embed it into an existing webpage. If you’ve chosen to manually review the responses, you can check back in the responses tab to review your students' answers.

Challenges of making a quiz in Google Forms

As a free tool, it’s only natural that Google Forms features are limited. Once you start creating more quizzes, or more complex ones, you’ll start to have some hiccups.

1. Can’t assign answer values that aren’t whole numbers

You have to select whole numbers when assigning point values to your questions in Google Forms. There’s no way to value a question at .5 or 1.5 points. This might seem like a minor inconvenience, but it can quickly become a hassle.

Take a matching exercise, for example. If each answer option needs to be at least one point, that one matching question could end up being worth ten points. Pair that with a short answer worth only three, and you’ve got yourself an issue.

Not all questions are created equal. Without the nuance to adjust points fully, it’s difficult to create a fairly graded quiz.

2. Limited question types

There are only ten total field types available in Google Forms. For most quizzes, you’ll be stuck with multiple choice, dropdown, short answer, or grid questions.

Multiple choice grid questions are a beast of their own. They’re confusing to set up and difficult to answer. And because there’s no native field for rating, matching, or ranking questions, these grid questions end up being a solution for a lot more than they can handle.

As a teacher, you know that every student learns differently. A wide variety of question types allows you to diversify assessment methods, so everyone has a chance to show off their skills. Not to mention, a quiz made up entirely of checkboxes is a bore for students and teachers alike.

3. No advanced calculations

Google Forms offers basic grading options for their quizzes. It’s a fantastic feature for simple tests and surveys. But if you’re creating a maths and science quiz or any assessment with more complex answer options, you’ll need a grading system with a little more power.

There are no advanced calculations available in Google Forms, which means there’s no way to support more dynamic excel-style functions. For math and science quizzes, in particular, this is a pretty big roadblock.

4. Can’t customise success pages based on the score

Google Forms can grade your quizzes automatically and share scores in real-time, but you can’t alter your success page based on these scores.

That means a student who gets 100% will be navigated to the same page as one who flunked completely. There’s no way to direct a student who’s struggling to further study materials, or congratulate a student who excelled upon completing your quiz.

Make quizzes more engaging with Paperform

If you’re looking for a quiz builder with a little more power, Paperform is the perfect solution. Our robust editor has the balance of beauty and brains you need to create engaging quizzes on any subject.

When you make a quiz with Paperform, you don’t need to worry about any of those pesky Google Forms roadblocks.

• You can assign any point value to any question, including decimals. And don’t worry about the math—Paperform will tally it all up for you to make the grading process easy.
• We have 25+ question types available, including rating, ranking, and linear scale. Diversifying your question types is as easy as selecting from a dropdown menu.
• Advanced calculations can handle any complex function you through at it. Bring it on, maths and science.
• Customise your success page based on scores or answers to individual questions, so each student gets the tailored response they deserve—automatically.

To get started, select a blank form or choose from one of our 650+ designer-made templates. We’ve got over 36 quiz templates ready to go, including this one that shows off our advanced calculations feature.

Click anywhere to add a question, or use our slash commands to create fields even faster. Simply select the question type and jump into the configuration menu to add your answer options.

Switch things up by tossing in some open text options, matrix questions, ranking fields, or more. Be sure to add a little flair with our robust customisation options. Our native integration with Unsplash and Giphy allows you to add royalty-free images, GIFs, and videos, all without leaving the editor.

You can bunch questions into sections, or, unlike Google Forms, break them up into separate pages.

By adding conditional logic to these sections, you can create a quiz that responds to your students in real-time. You could offer more advanced questions when students answer correctly or pose more rudimentary questions when they get stumped.

Self-scoring is a breeze, too. Just hop into the form behaviour menu to assign point values to each question and pick the correct answers.

Click over to the After Submission tab to customise your success page while you’re at it, so students are directed to unique pages based on their total score.

Like any Paperform creation, your quiz comes backed with 3,000 direct and Zapier integrations. Connect it with Google Sheets to create an organised score sheet automatically, or with Slack and Discord to direct students to online study groups based on their final scores.

Thinking about making the move from Google Forms? You can easily migrate your forms over to Paperform with our Google Forms import tool.

Take the dread out of exam day

It’s possible with Paperform. Thanks to our intuitive editor and advanced features, you can create quizzes students don’t hate taking, and teachers don’t hate making. Quiz-building is just one-way Paperform can support educators as a versatile piece of teacher software.

And when you make your quizzes with Paperform, you get access to all of our features designed to make your life just a little bit easier.

• Automate emails: Send thank you emails to every respondent. Use answer piping to thank them by name, or reference a particular answer they gave.
• Conditional logic: Create a streamlined, personal form-taking experience by displaying only relevant fields to each respondent. Paperform’s conditional logic is powerful and easy to understand, so everyone can make use of it.
• Integrate to automate: Use direct integrations to connect with apps like monday.com and Notion, or integrate with Zapier to unlock over 5,000 integrations with your favourite apps.
• Collect signatures: Our dedicated electronic signature field makes collecting signatures in any form a breeze.
• Analytics: Gain insights into your form data from our robust built-in Analytics dashboard.
• Accept payment: Process payments with PayPal, Stripe, Square, Braintree and more, all with zero processing fees.
• Embed anywhere: Host your form as a stand-alone page or a pop-up, share it on social media, or embed it in a website.