Another WordPress Quiz Plugin?

Welcome to PressPrimer! I’m Ryan, and I’m the cofounder of PressPrimer. For those who don’t know me, I cofounded Uncanny Owl back in 2013 and left earlier this year after the company was fully acquired by my partners. Uncanny Owl is the creator of Uncanny Automator and several popular elearning plugins, and I had an amazing 12 years growing the team and company—but it was time for a break. My former partners continue to do great work at Uncanny (and my wife is still a happy employee!). After spending my time post-Uncanny helping my sister-in-law get a business off the ground and figure out what I wanted to do next, I’m excited to tackle something that’s very close to my heart: improving how education is delivered and measured in WordPress.

Yes, There Are Lots of Quiz Plugins

After over a decade working with quizzes in WordPress, I got to know the landscape pretty well. And yes, there are a lot of quiz plugins out there. Do a search for WordPress quiz plugins and you’ll turn up over 50 plugins, many of which are quite good at what they do, and each is trying to solve a particular problem for a specific audience.

There are the dedicated quiz plugins, which tend to focus on lots of question types, lots of themes, and basic scoring. There are the LMS plugins with built-in quizzes, which are focused more on scoring and connect quiz performance to course progress. There are the form builders with quiz features, which add basic quiz and scoring features to the context of more complex forms. And then there are the lead generation quiz builders, which are typically designed for email capture and marketing funnels.

What’s missing from that list is a quiz plugin that prioritizes actual learning and knowledge transfer. If you look at user reviews across the quiz categories, the same type of complaints keep coming up: not enough analytics, no way to tie scores to learning, clunky interfaces, and not living up to the learning experience site owners want.

What WP Quiz Plugins Get Wrong

Most quiz plugins treat assessment as a simple input and output: answers go in, scores go out. But how do educators know if students are actually learning? How do they measure whether or not course materials have actually made learners better prepared and equipped with more knowledge that they will actually apply in the future? How can quizzes be structured so they actually promote knowledge retention and learning?

These are questions that WordPress quiz plugins aren’t addressing right now. Some are focused on engagement metrics, like completion rates or time spent, but how does that correlate with learning? Some enterprise-level assessment platforms are making significant progress with these issues, but those tools cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That type of budget simply isn’t feasible for most WordPress site owners.

Here’s a frightening statistic: people forget 50% of all new information within a day and 90% of all new information within a week (source). If you’re a course creator, that should scare you. Even if a student can pull off 80% on a quiz based on information they learned five minutes prior, how much will they retain a week later? Existing WordPress solutions might be cheap, or even free, but there’s little value if they don’t provide the features and tools that students and educators need. What WordPress users who care about knowledge transfer actually need are quizzes that not only look good, but promote learning, offer insights into making training better, allow students to direct and improve their own learning process, and perform well at scale.

What We’re Building with PressPrimer Quiz

As I write this, version 1.0 of the free plugin is with the WordPress.org team undergoing a review. It starts with the basics only, and we’re trying to build a very strong foundation for what will become a comprehensive assessment suite. (Having said that, it already offers more features than many paid quiz plugins.)

There are only three question types (multiple choice, multiple answer, and true/false) because we want to focus on doing them exceptionally well. There are deep integrations with LearnDash, Tutor LMS, and LifterLMS from day one. It has modern, clean, and professional interfaces, with a focus on simplicity and not endless features. There’s a custom database architecture built for scale, and you’ll have no trouble working with and reporting on data sets with tens of thousands of questions and hundreds of thousands of quiz attempts. And it’s all built with learning science in mind.

The free version isn’t crippled in any way. In fact, you can connect it to OpenAI and generate large question sets from entire books as input (even PDF and Word documents of up to 250,000 characters are supported). You can create unlimited quizzes and questions, and it supports dynamic quiz generation from large question banks based on question category, difficulty, and tag. It’s designed with repetition and knowledge transfer in mind, so students can see how their progress trends.

What’s Next

Right now, we just really want your feedback. Try PressPrimer Quiz out. Send us your feedback and tell us what we can do better. Sign up for our mailing list.

While you do that, we’re starting on version 2.0 of the free plugin and some premium add-ons. The free version is genuinely powerful and no paid upgrades will be forced; the premium tiers will be focused on specialized features, like advanced reporting, xAPI support, spaced repetition, group management, quiz assignments, front-end custom quiz creation, etc. Stay tuned, because we have a lot planned in the next six months.

I hope you’re as excited about we are about the future of elearning in WordPress. We really hope you’ll give the free version a try, and if you do, let us know what you like and don’t like!

And if you’re wondering about the squirrel, we chose that as our mascot because of the leadership team’s ties to Exeter, Canada: home of the white squirrel.