Writing effective wrong answers (distractors) is one of the hardest parts of creating multiple choice questions. A good distractor needs to be believable enough that someone who doesn’t fully understand the material might select it, but clearly wrong to someone who knows the subject. The AI Distractor Generation feature uses your configured AI provider, either OpenAI or Anthropic (Claude), to generate plausible distractors for your questions.

Requirements

AI Distractor Generation requires:

• PressPrimer Quiz
• An API key for OpenAI or Anthropic (Claude) configured in PressPrimer Quiz > Settings > Integrations. See AI Question Generation for provider setup; distractor generation uses the same provider settings.
• Multiple choice or multiple answer questions (True/False questions have fixed answers)

Generating Distractors for a Single Question

To generate distractors for an individual question:

1. Navigate to PressPrimer Quiz > Question Banks and open the bank containing your question.
2. Click the question to open the Question Editor.
3. In the Answers section, click the Generate Distractors button.
4. Choose how many distractors to generate (1 to 7).
5. Click Generate and wait for the AI to process.

The AI analyzes the question stem, correct answer, category, and difficulty level to create contextually appropriate wrong answers. If your existing answers include feedback, the AI will also generate feedback for the new distractors.

Reviewing Generated Distractors

Generated distractors are not added to your question automatically. Each suggestion goes through a review process where you can:

• Approve: Accept the distractor as-is
• Edit: Modify the distractor text or feedback before approving
• Reject: Discard the distractor

After reviewing all suggestions, click Apply Approved to add the approved distractors to your question. This creates a new revision of the question with the additional answer options.

Bulk Generation

For large question libraries, you can generate distractors across an entire question bank:

1. Navigate to PressPrimer Quiz > Question Banks.
2. Click on a question bank to open it.
3. Click the Bulk Generate Distractors button near the top of the page.
4. Choose how many answers each question should have; the tool will generate additional answers to meet that target for any questions that have fewer than that number of answers.
5. Click Start to begin processing.

A progress tracker shows the status of each question. The bulk tool is useful when you have imported a large set of questions or want to expand your question library so each question has a consistent number of answer choices.

Best Practices

• Always review AI suggestions: While the AI generates plausible distractors, human review ensures accuracy and appropriateness for your specific context.
• Provide context: Questions with clear stems, assigned categories, and defined difficulty levels produce better distractors.
• Check for duplicates: The AI avoids duplicating existing distractors, but similar phrasing may occasionally appear.
• Consider your audience: Edit generated distractors if they use terminology that differs from what your students have learned.

Troubleshooting

• “API key not configured”: Add an API key for your chosen provider in PressPrimer Quiz > Settings > Integrations.
• “Invalid API key”: Verify your API key is correct and that your provider account has available credits.
• “Rate limit reached”: Wait a moment and try again. Providers limit requests per minute.
• Generation fails or comes back incomplete with Claude models: Update the Educator add-on to 3.1.0 or higher and the free plugin to its matching 3.1 release, which added support for the newest Claude models.
• Button not appearing: Distractor generation is only available for multiple choice and multiple answer questions, not True/False.