Creating a simple quiz in Google Forms takes less than five minutes.
1. Get started by logging into Google Forms and opening a blank form.
2. Go to the settings page and turn the "Make this a quiz" toggle to the on position. This will allow you to select correct answers and assign certain values to these answers.
3. Add all the questions you'd like to ask your students. You can do this by clicking the "Add question" button and choosing the type of question you want to add to your form.
Google Forms has eight question types that are relevant to quizzes:
- Short answer
- Paragraph
- Multiple-choice
- Checkboxes
- Dropdown
- Linear scale
- Grid
4. Once you've added all your questions, it's time to assign values to the correct answers. You can do this by clicking the “Answer key” icon, choosing the correct answer, assigning a value to it, and clicking "Done."
5. If you'd like to give students feedback when they choose the wrong answer, click "Add answer feedback" and write a short snippet next to each incorrect answer.
6. After you've done this for all your questions, share your form with students. Google Forms will automatically add up all your students’ points and give them a total score when they are finished.
However, there are a few issues you'll run into when using this approach:
- The question types are very limited
- There are no advanced calculations
- You can only assign whole numbers
- You can't personalize your success page based on the final score
When we built MightyForms, we aimed to solve all these problems by giving teachers more flexibility. You aren’t limited to the basic features that Google Forms offer.
Below, we'll discuss in more detail the problems we experienced when creating quizzes inside Google Forms and how we aimed to solve them with MightyForms.
Note: We are MightyForms, an online form builder that’s tailor-made for building complex quizzes. Although Google Forms is fine if you’re creating a simple quiz, you’ll quickly run into problems when adding advanced calculations and various question types. So if you’re creating complex quizzes regularly, sign up for a seven-day free MightyForms trial! You don’t have to enter your card info!
The question types are very limited
When creating a quiz inside Google Forms, you'll only find eight question types. You're basically stuck with multiple choice, short answer, grid, and dropdown questions.
Since you can't ask rating, ranking, or matching questions, you'll have to use the multiple-choice field instead.
How MightyForms solves this:
With MightyForms, you access a wider variety of question types, such as:
- Open-field questions
- Likert Scale questions
- Icon questions
- Image-choice questions
- Matching questions
- Dropdown questions
- Rating questions
- And more!
All you have to do is create a form, and on the left-hand side of your dashboard, you'll find these question fields.
Simply drag and drop a question field of your choice onto your form, and you're good to go.
There are no advanced calculations
Google Forms is great when creating quizzes with basic grading options. However, if you're creating advanced science or math quizzes with complex answer options, then Google Forms will really limit you.
Google Forms doesn't offer advanced calculations, which really limits you if you’re creating dynamic forms that change based on user inputs.
So, if you're a math or science teacher and you need to do advanced form calculations on certain fields within your form, we'd recommend giving MightyForms a shot instead.
How MightyForms solves this:
MightyForms allows you to use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division when totaling your student's grades. You can even use Excel-style functions to transform, combine, and manipulate form answers.
This makes creating complicated math and physics quizzes a walk in the park.
You can only assign whole numbers
Another limiting factor about Google Forms is that you can only assign whole numbers to your form's answers. For example, you can assign 10, 20, or 30 points to an answer, but you can't assign 10.5 or 20.5 points.
This is a problem because if your school or college has established grading principles that use decimals digits, you won't be able to adhere to these principles with Google Forms.
Another scenario in which you might want to use decimals is when you want to give students half a point if they only answered half the question correctly. For example, if you're asking a math question and your student's workings are right, but the final answer is wrong, you might want to assign half a point.
How MightyForms solves this:
When creating a quiz instead of MightyForms, you can assign any value to your answer, including decimal points. MightyForms will then tally up all your students' answers after the test. You aren't limited to only using whole numbers.
You can't personalize your success page based on the final score
The last issue we ran into when making quizzes inside Google Forms was that we couldn't personalize the final success page based on how well a student did.
For example, if a student got full marks, it would be nice to send them to a page congratulating them. Or, if a student did poorly, we'd ideally want to send them to a page motivating them and showing them how to do better.
Unfortunately, Google Forms only allows you to send students to a single success page.
How MightyForms solves this:
With MightyForms, you can send students to various success pages depending on their test scores. This way, you can personalize your student's experience by congratulating them or showing them their mistakes and how they can improve.
Next steps
If you're looking for a more advanced form builder than Google Forms, consider signing up for a free MightyForms trial. You can ask a wide variety of questions, run advanced calculations, assign decimals to correct answers, and personalize the success page based on how well the student did.
These are a few other factors that we believe set MightyForms apart from Google Forms and other form builders:
- Pre-built student templates: When you create a quiz with MightyForms, you’ll find multiple templates for math, physics, and other types of tests. Unlike Google Forms’ generic templates, our templates are personalized around advanced quizzes.
- AI form analysis: Google Forms only gives you basic analytics features like bounce rate and total time on page. This is why we added AI form analysis to MightyForms so you can access more advanced analytics like being able to see how long student’s took to answer your question.
- Responsive web forms without coding: When you open a Google Form quiz on mobile, it can seem small and cluttered. That is why you can create different versions of the same form using MightyForms, so you tailor how your form looks on mobile, tablet, desktop computers, and laptop.
If you want to see first-hand how simple and effective MightyForms is, sign up for a seven-day free trial.