How to add points and calculations in Google Forms

How to add points in Google Forms

Let’s walk through everything you need to know about adding points and creating self-grading quizzes, complete with screenshots and tips and tricks.

1. Make your form a quiz

Head to Google Forms and open up a new form. You can start with a blank form or choose from their limited template gallery.

From within the editor, navigate to the Settings tab and toggle on Make this a quiz. This is a key step—if your form isn’t a quiz, you won’t be able to add points to your questions.

2. Add your questions

Return to the Questions tab and select add question from the sidebar menu to the right. Google Forms has 11 field types in total, but from those you can only add point values to three.

If you’re looking to create a self-grading quiz, you’ll want to stick with multiple-choice, grid, or dropdown questions. These are the only types of questions that support automatic grading.

Add and label your questions according to your use case. For our example, we’ll be making a geography quiz. We’ll add multiple-choice questions and a matching grid question.

3. Assign point values via the answer key

Once you’ve finished adding your questions, it’s time to assign point values. You’ll need to do this on a per-question (or per-answer) basis.

Select the blue answer key icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your first question. This will open up an editing menu.

From here, select the correct answer to your question. If there’s more than one right answer, select all possible correct responses.

Near the top of the question, you’ll see a dropdown menu with a number on it. This is the point value of your question. You can click to add a whole number or type in the point value yourself.

Complete this process for each of question to add points to your Google Form. As you do, you’ll notice the total tally go up in the upper right-hand corner of the editor.

4. Add answer feedback

This step is optional but recommended, as it’s a helpful way to automate more of the grading process. (Calculations and conditional success pages would be more helpful, but hey, with Google Forms, you take what you can get).

Google Forms allows you to add custom answer feedback for both correct and incorrect answers. After clicking on the Answer key icon, select Add answer feedback to create your own automatic responses.

These messages will be displayed to your form respondents when they answer the questions.

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

5. Adjust your sharing settings

Your quiz is done, points are added, and you’re ready to share it with the world. Head to the Settings tab to get started.

From here, you can choose whether you’d like scores to be released immediately after submission, respondents to be able to view the correct answers, and if you want to share the quiz with members outside of your organisation.

You can also choose to collect email addresses and store quiz responses in a Google Sheet, which can be a helpful way to keep form submissions organised.

Challenges of adding points in Google Forms

When it comes to creating self-grading quizzes for marketing or education in Google Forms, you’ll run into more than a few roadblocks.

As a free software, Google Forms just doesn’t have the robust features you need to create automatic, customisable online quizzes.

1. It's difficult to add point values based on answers

Adding point values based on answers in Google Forms is limited and confusing. To do it, you need to use a multiple-choice grid question and assign a point value to each answer option individually.

Let’s say you’re creating a “hair type” quiz for your shampoo business. The easiest way to do it would be to have a set of multiple-choice questions where all the “a” answers are worth one point, all the “b” answers are worth two, and so on.

People who receive a total of 1-3 points would be directed to one hair type, while those who scored 4-7 would be directed to another.

If you want to do that in Google Forms, your quiz would have to be filled with complicated grid questions—you can’t assign different point values to regular multiple choice question. It’s pretty tedious.

2. You can't add decimals

When you’re adding points to questions or answers, you’ll need to stick to whole numbers. There’s no way to add half points, fractions, or decimals.

This might seem like a small issue, but if you’re working with longer quizzes with multiple question types, it can quickly become a big deal.

Take our geography quiz, for example. A matching question with 10 options would need to be worth at least 10 points.

Pair that with a short answer question worth five, and you’ve got an unevenly weighted quiz. You'd have to increase your point tally significantly to balance it out.

3. Lack of conditional success pages and redirects

One of the benefits of scoring quizzes is that you can customise the user experience based on results—except with Google Forms, you can't.

There is no way to redirect respondents to unique success pages based on their scores.

Sure, you can have the score tallied and shared with them, but your form can’t do anything with that information. No custom webhooks, no personalised follow-up emails based on score, no special congratulations page for star students—nothin’.

4. No advanced calculations

One of the bigger limitations is the lack of calculations. There’s no way to tell your quiz to complete Excel-style functions based on form responses, and no way to have those calculations reflected in the form experience in real-time.

For longer quizzes, maths and science exams, or anything involving calculating a price with taxes and additional fees, this is a huge roadblock.

In order to do something like this in Google Forms, you’d have to access the individual responses from Google Sheets, and insert your functions cell by cell, column by column.

You’d have to do this for each response, then take those solutions and manually send them back to respondents. This is, in technical terms, a total pain in the butt.

Score quizzes (and much more!) with Paperform

Adding points to your quiz is only the beginning. Once your questions are set and your points are tallied, the real work begins.

With Paperform, you can create beautiful, powerful quizzes that automate the grading process for you. We have a solution for every roadblock you’ll hit while using Google Forms.

• Paperforms are highly customisable and designed to be easy to use
• You can add any point value you like to your questions
• You can direct respondents to custom success pages based on their score
• Our advanced calculations can handle any complex equations you throw at it

Quiz building is a breeze with our intuitive doc-style editor. Just click anywhere in your form to add over 25+ field types (including Matrix questions so you can wave Google Forms' grids goodbye).

Choose from one of our 650+ custom-made templates or create your own from scratch.

Adding points to your quiz is easy. Just hop into the configuration menu to assign point values (including decimals and fractions) to all of your questions or answers—all from one place. No need to shuffle through each question individually.

Paperform supports automatic scoring for all of your creations. You can share the scores with respondents via automatic, personalised emails, and use them to set conditional logic rules during or after the form.

For teachers, that means you can create a quiz that gets progressively more challenging as students answer questions correctly. For marketers, you could create an intake quiz that adjusts in real time based on your leads’ preferences.

No matter what kind of quiz you need to score, our conditional logic makes it sleeker, easier, and more professional.

Unlike Google Forms, you can also direct respondents to custom success pages based on their scores. Take our world capitals quiz, for example.

Students who score over 80% will be directed to a congratulatory page, while those who score under 80% are directed to further study materials.

And then there’s our advanced Calculations. Your form can complete Excel-style functions automatically. It’s a highly versatile—perfect for creating the complex, unique quizzes you just can’t make in Google Forms.

Calculate unique rates for delivery businesses or ecommerce stores, complete with discount codes, taxation, and any other additional fees you might need.

Educators can use it to grade complex math and science equations (and save time doing it manually), or create a fun personality quiz, to get to know your students a little better.

If it requires crunching numbers and you don’t want to do it manually, odds are you can build an automatic solution with Calculations.