How to Create Quizzes from PDFs in WordPress

If you’ve ever stared at a 100-page PDF training manual or a set of textbook chapters and thought, “How am I going to build a quiz out of this?”, you already know the pain. Between reading through the material, identifying key concepts, coming up with plausible distractors, and crafting appropriate questions that really assess knowledge at the right level, it’s hard and time-consuming to create effective quizzes. That’s time that could be better spent on actual teaching and student support.

There’s a better way to create quizzes from dense source material in WordPress. With the free version of PressPrimer Quiz and an OpenAI API key, you can upload a PDF or Word document and have all of your quiz questions generated in minutes. It’s cheap (25 questions from 100 pages of source material might cost a few cents), easy, and convenient. Everything just works.

Why PDFs for Source Material

A lot of educational content (yours or third-party) already exists in document form. From employee handbooks and product documentation to textbooks and journal articles, much of the material used for courses is probably already in a PDF format. It’s an easy way to share documentation that works across devices and platforms. From Google Docs and Word to book authoring tools like Scrivener, almost every content creation tool supports PDF exports.

How PressPrimer Quiz Handles Question Generation

PressPrimer Quiz allows you to use your own OpenAI key to generate content. There’s no credit system, nothing passes through our servers, and there’s no markup. This keeps costs predictable, you can use any model you want, and you have full control over what data gets sent to OpenAI. The plugin encrypts and stores your API securely; it’s never exposed in the browser or sent anywhere except to OpenAI’s servers.

Here’s how the generation process works:

1. Upload your PDF or Word document.
2. Choose how many questions you want to generate. The plugin supports a maximum of 50 per batch to avoid the risk of timeouts or other issues.
3. Select the question types: Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, and True/False.
4. Set the difficulty levels for the questions you want generated.
5. Choose how many answers you want for each Multiple Choice and Multiple Answer question.
6. Let OpenAI generate the questions, answers, and feedback for you. When large source files and question sets are involved, this can take several minutes.
7. Review and make changes to the generated questions.
8. Add the questions to a question bank, which can then be used in your quizzes.

The AI doesn’t just create question stems—it generates plausible wrong answers and feedback for every option.

Setting Up Your OpenAI API Key

Before you can generate quiz questions with AI, you’ll need to connect your OpenAI account in PressPrimer Quiz. If you don’t have one yet, head to https://platform.openai.com/ and create an account, then add a payment method and generate an API key.

To connect your key to PressPrimer Quiz:

1. Go to PressPrimer Quiz > Settings in /wp-admin/ as an administrator.

2. In the Integrations tab, enter your API key in the Enter New API Key field near the top.
3. Click Save Key.
4. Choose a Preferred Model for your quiz generation. At the time of writing, gpt-5-mini is recommended as a low-cost, high-quality option for generating quiz questions.

Generating Quiz Questions from a PDF File

With your API key configured, navigate to PressPrimer Quiz > Question Banks. To add generated questions to a new question bank, click the Add New button at the top. More details about creating and managing question banks are included in the Question Banks article in the Knowledge Base. To add questions to an existing bank, hover over the bank and click Questions.

When the page loads, you’ll see a Generate with AI tab directly beneath the bank details. Within that area, click the Upload File tab to expose the document upload tool. Simply drag your file in, choose your parameters, and click Generate Questions. The process can take a few minutes, but at the end, a list of questions will pop up! You can make any edits and check off which questions you want to add to your question bank.

When reviewing questions, make sure you consider the following, because AI won’t always get everything right:

• Accuracy: Does the question correctly reflect the source material?
• Clarity: Is the question clear and not ambiguous?
• Distractors: Are the wrong answers plausible but incorrect, and is the difficulty level appropriate?
• Feedback: If you had AI generate feedback, will it help learners understand why answers are right or wrong and learn from their mistakes?

Tips for Better AI-Generated Quiz Questions

The quality of your AI-generated questions depends a lot on your source material and the parameters you set. Here are some helpful tips for getting better questions:

• Be selective with your source content. AI works best with focused, information-dense text. Using a 200-page document and asking for 5 questions won’t be enough to test key points, and similarly, asking for 50 questions from a 1-page file won’t produce good output.
• Start with fewer questions. Generate 5 questions first and review the quality. If they’re good and what you want, generate more. This helps you set expectations before committing to a large batch.
• Use a mix of difficulty. Easy questions tend to focus on definitions and basic recall, while harder questions require more application and analysis. Use a mix for a balanced assessment.
• Regenerate if needed. There’s some randomness with AI generation, so if you’re not happy with the first results, try again.

Get Started!

Ready to turn your PDFs into quizzes on your WordPress site? To get started in minutes, you only need:

• PressPrimer Quiz, available free on WordPress.org
• An OpenAI account with API access

Just install and activate the plugin, connect your API key, and upload your first PDF file. The questions that used to take hours for you to write out can be generated in minutes.