This article expands on the basics of Creating your First Quiz to explore settings in more detail.

The Quiz Editor

Quizzes are accessed from PressPrimer Quiz > Quizzes in /wp-admin/. To add a new quiz, click the Add New button at the top of the page. To edit an existing quiz, hover over the title in the Quizzes table and click Edit.

The Edit Quiz page has 3 tabs for each quiz:

• Settings: Where all settings for the quiz are defined, including the type.
• Questions/Rules: The second tab either allows question management (if it’s a “Fixed Questions” quiz) or defining rules for which questions from question banks are included (if it’s a “Dynamic Rules” quiz).
• Feedback: Optionally allows quiz-level feedback to be defined based on the user’s score.

Note that almost all fields in PressPrimer Quiz have tooltips, so if you’re ever not sure what something does or want more context, just hover over the question mark icons.

Quiz Settings

Every quiz has a variety of options that can be defined. The only required field is the title; everything else can be left with the default settings. Also note that anything you set at the quiz level overrides global defaults, so if (as an example) you set the default quiz pass score to 75% in the plugin settings, and then set the pass score as 70% for a specific quiz, that quiz will use the 70% pass score.

Instead of configuring every setting by hand, you can use the Apply template button on the Settings tab to fill in a complete set of settings at once, or Save as template to reuse the current quiz’s settings on future quizzes. See Quiz Templates for details.

Basic Information

The Quiz Title is the name shown both to students and to make the quiz identifiable in /wp-admin/.

Adding a Description is optional and is shown to students beneath the quiz title before they begin. It might be used to provide instructions, context, learning objectives, or other information pertinent to students.

New quizzes are set to a Status of Published by default, which means they can be added to pages or posts and students can complete them in the front end. If a quiz isn’t yet ready for publication, a status of Draft can be used, which means it cannot be selected for inclusion on pages or posts. If a quiz has been retired, a status of Archived is available.

Three theme options are available for all quizzes. Beyond the theme types themselves, the fonts, colors, and size can be adjusted in PressPrimer Quiz > Settings > Appearance.

Question Generation

New quizzes are defaulted to Fixed Questions, which means you must manually choose which questions to include in a quiz from the Questions tab. Whatever questions you choose are presented to students for every quiz attempt.

Choosing Dynamic Rules means that questions are selected randomly from question banks that you define based on category, difficulty, and other criteria. Every attempt by any student will pull a different set of questions into that quiz attempt based on the rules you define in the Rules tab.

Quiz Behaviour

The Quiz Mode options are Tutorial Mode and Test Mode. The former sets up quizzes where students check their answer and get feedback after answering every question. They get instant updates and it helps with learning to get the immediate feedback. With Test Mode, students advance through all questions in the quiz and only get any feedback after the assessment is submitted.

The Practice Quiz toggle marks the quiz as a practice quiz: students get unlimited, untimed attempts with immediate feedback, regardless of the mode, time limit, and attempt settings, and their attempts are excluded from grade reports. Settings that are bypassed show a note and keep their values, so turning the toggle off restores the quiz exactly as configured. See Practice Mode for details.

A quiz can have a Time Limit set in minutes. When this is active, users will see a countdown in the upper right area of the quiz as they complete it. This time is preserved between sessions, so if the user leaves the quiz and resumes it later, the time will start from where they left off. If the countdown reaches 0, the quiz is automatically submitted with whatever answers the user has selected up to that point.

The Passing Score defines what score determines whether the student passes or fails the quiz.

Scoring

The Multiple-Answer Scoring setting controls how questions with more than one correct answer are scored. Four modes are available, ranging from most lenient to most strict:

• Right Minus Wrong: Each wrong selection cancels out one correct selection, and the score never goes below zero. For a 3-correct question, selecting 2 correct and 1 wrong scores 0.33.
• Partial Credit: Each correct selection earns proportional credit and wrong selections are ignored. Selecting 2 correct and 1 wrong on a 3-correct question scores 0.67.
• Partial Credit, No Wrong Answers: Each correct selection earns proportional credit, but any wrong selection results in zero for the question. 2 correct and 1 wrong scores 0.00; 2 correct and 0 wrong scores 0.67.
• All or Nothing: Full credit is awarded only when every correct answer is selected and no wrong answers are selected. Anything else scores 0.00.

By default, quizzes use the site-wide scoring mode set in PressPrimer Quiz > Settings > General. The site default is indicated next to the matching option. Setting a mode here overrides the site default for this quiz only. This setting only affects multiple-answer questions; single-answer and True/False questions are unaffected.

Navigation & Attempts

Allow Skip Questions lets users proceed to later questions without having to answer the active question. Students can then go back later to answer questions they skipped.

Allow Backward Navigation allows users to go back and change their answers for previously answered questions.

Allow Resume lets users exit a quiz and return later to where they left off. If there is an active attempt, students must continue and complete it. Resume works across devices, so if a user starts a quiz on their phone, they can pick up from exactly where they left off on a desktop or laptop. The resume function remembers all answers and the question the user was on when they left, so they jump back to the exact state that they left the quiz in.

By default, students can complete a quiz an unlimited number of times. To restrict this, enter a number in the Maximum Attempts field. You can also delay how long users have to wait between attempts in the Delay Between Attempts field.

Display & Presentation

Enabling Randomize Question Order will show students questions in a random order. Note that the question order is generated automatically when the user first starts the quiz, and if they exit and resume it later, the order of questions for that attempt is retained. If the user completes the quiz and starts it again, they will get a new random order (and random questions, if Dynamic Rules are used) on later attempts.

Randomize Answer Options shuffles the order of possible answers. Note that this applies to True/False questions as well, so False may appear above True when this is turned on.

Show Points per Question displays the point value next to each question during the quiz and on the results page. This is useful when questions have different weights, helping students make better decisions about where to focus their time.

By default, the front end quiz system shows one question and its associated answers per page. If you prefer to show several questions on a page, turn on Paginated and update the Questions Per Page value.

Maximum Answers per Question lets you show students a random subset of answer options instead of all of them. If a question has more answers than the maximum you set, students see all of the correct answers plus a random selection of distractors, up to the maximum. Questions with fewer answers than the maximum are shown in full. This lets you write questions with extra distractors so that retakes feel different, since each attempt can show a different mix of wrong answers.

The selection is made when a student starts an attempt and is preserved on resume, so they always see the same answers in the same order. All correct answers are always shown.

The Display Density setting controls the visual spacing of the quiz interface. Choose Standard for the default layout with comfortable spacing, or Condensed for a streamlined layout with reduced vertical spacing between elements. This is ideal for quizzes with many questions or where screen real estate is limited. The default display density can also be set globally under Settings > Appearance.

The Show Correct Answers setting determines if users will see correct answers (and associated feedback) if they submit the quiz (even if they fail), only if they pass, or never.

The Enable Confidence Rating option asks students to rate each answer as Low, Medium, or High confidence as they take the quiz. Rating is optional, can be cleared, and never affects scoring. On the results page, students then see a Confidence Check that highlights questions they felt sure about but got wrong (a great place to start reviewing) and questions they got right despite feeling unsure, with links to each question in the review.

Question Pools let you build quizzes with more questions than students actually see. This is ideal for practice tests, certification prep, and reducing cheating on retakes.

Enable Limit questions per attempt and enter the number of questions students should see. The pool size displays dynamically so you always know how many questions are available.

Question selection happens when the user starts an attempt and is stored permanently. If a student pauses and resumes later (even from a different device), they see the same questions in the same order. Scoring is calculated based on the questions each student actually sees, and the pass percentage applies to visible questions only.

Question pools work with both fixed and dynamic quizzes. For dynamic quizzes, the rules on the Rules tab determine which questions are eligible first, then the pool setting controls how many of those questions a student actually sees.

For dynamic and pooled quizzes, the Prefer Unseen Questions option makes retakes fresher. When it is on, question selection prefers questions the student has not seen before, and only repeats questions once the fresh ones run out, starting with the ones seen longest ago. The option applies per student, so guests (who have no history to draw on) and quizzes where every question is shown anyway behave exactly as before. If the pool is not much larger than the number of questions shown, repeats will still occur; the setting changes the order questions repeat in, and quiz generation never fails because of it.

Display Options

The Display Options panel lets you set quiz-level defaults for which elements appear on the quiz start page and results page. These defaults apply everywhere the quiz is shown, including when it is embedded through an LMS integration (LearnDash, Tutor LMS, LifterLMS, or LearnPress) where block and shortcode attributes are not available.

The toggles are grouped into two sections. Start Page controls the description, question count, quiz type, time limit, pass percentage, attempt count, and attempt history. Results Page controls the score, pass/fail status, time spent, average score, category breakdown, question review, scoring explanations, and retake button.

The Quiz Editor also includes a Premium Settings tab. On the free plugin it previews the per-quiz options added by the premium add-ons, such as pre/post test linking, spaced repetition, branching, and proctoring. When an add-on is active, its settings are configured on this tab.

Questions / Rules

For Fixed Questions quizzes, a Questions tab is available to choose which questions to add to a quiz. On load, you will see questions that are currently assigned (where you can edit questions, change weightings, or remove them from the quiz) as well as a button to Add Questions. Clicking that button will show you a list of all available questions, which you can then filter. Check any questions you want to add to the quiz.

For Dynamic Rules quizzes, you will see a Rules tab instead of Questions. In it, you can use the Add Rule button to define which question banks to pull questions from, and which types of questions (based on category, tag, and difficulty) to include in dynamically generated quizzes.

Feedback

The Feedback tab allows enabling quiz-level feedback that’s provided to students based on their scores. Just check the switch to enable it, then enter what messages you want to show to students for each range of scores.

Troubleshooting

• If a quiz won’t publish, make sure it has a title and at least one question.
• If no questions are showing in Dynamic Rules mode, make sure the filters aren’t too restrictive and that the question banks aren’t empty.
• If the timer isn’t appearing, make sure a time limit has been set.
• If students can’t access a quiz, make sure the quiz is in Published, that the page with the quiz is published, and that the learner hasn’t reached their attempt limit.
• If recent settings aren’t applied to in-progress quizzes, complete the quiz and try again. Changes aren’t applied to in-progress quizzes intentionally to keep them fair.