What is Exam on OpenLearning, and where can you create them?

updated 12 days agoTue, March 25, 2025 at 6:46 AM UTC

What is an Exam on OpenLearning?

The ability to create an exam for learners to partake on OpenLearning
Insert the exam into a course page
Add question from the question bank to the exam

Pro tip: Grade items, such as exams, are automatically linked to the class in which they are created. However, you can reuse these items in other classes by copying them. This feature saves you time and effort, especially when teaching the same course across multiple classes.

How is this different to our quiz?

Exam is a separate environment solely for assessment purposes. This will cater to requirements such as:

Exam timer
Questions from Question Bank

Examination tool is a new feature on OpenLearning. To create an exam, please make sure that you are able to see the Assessment tab in your course’s sidebar. The Assessment tab will appear to a Course Admin, Assessor and Assessment Designer.

Creating an exam from the Gradebook

From the sidebar, select Gradebook. Gradebook is the page where you add any items that you would like to be graded. For more information about the Gradebook, click here.

To create an exam, click Add grade item button located at the top of the table. In an empty state, the “Add grade item” button will be located in the center of the page. Fill in your exam name and exam description and click Add to grade book.

This will take you to the main Gradebook section. In this section, you need to set up the following:

1. Weight: Assign the weight or score for your grade items.
2. Visibility: Select the appropriate visibility setting for your learners' view and click Save. The default visibility of the item is Fill report on release. The other available options are Score only and Hidden.

3. Action: Click the three dots, select Edit to continue modifying your grade item report, or choose Delete to remove the grade item report.

Add your exam questions

In the Gradebook dashboard, open the exam that you just created to populate your exams. The “Edit exam” drawer will be opened where you can:

Change your exam name
Change your exam description
Define a time limit
Select whether you’d like to randomise the order of questions in the exam

To add the questions in, select the “Questions” tab in the drawer. You will be given two choices:

To select manually which questions you would like to add from the question bank
To create a random question set from the question bank

Selecting questions from the bank and adding them to the exam

1. To select manually which questions you would like to add to the exam, simply click Add questions.

3. To preview the question content, simply click the question name.

4. Once you are happy with your choices, click Continue.

6. Set points for each question type and click Save once you are done. You can also click Preview exam to see what the exam will look like in a real setting.

Create a random question and add them to the exam

If you choose to create a random question set for your exam, simply select the “Random question set” option. This tool is especially handy if you have a question bank with a lot of questions, and you’d like to create exams that pulls questions easily from that bank. Instead of all students receiving the exact same set of questions, the system draws different questions randomly for each individual or group of students, ensuring that each test or quiz is unique. In the modal, you will need to fill in:

The number of questions
Points per questions
From which question bank
Which question type

In the example below, I chose to create a random question set of four questions taken from my own question bank. Each question will have 2 points.

What happens if I have insufficient questions in my bank when I’m trying to set up my random question set?

You can still create a random question set even if your question bank has insufficient questions. This allows educators to set up their exams first and build their question banks later. However, an exam with a random question set that lacks sufficient questions cannot run in the exam runner.

To ensure educators complete their exam configuration, four labels will appear, indicating that the exam has insufficient questions and requires attention.

Label 1: “This is less than the number of questions you specified”

Label 2: “There are not enough questions to populate this question set”

Label 3 LEARNERS ONLY - In the block page, it will say, "exam is still under construction". The Start exam button will be disabled.

Label 3.1 EDUCATORS/COURSE ADMIN ONLY - In the block page, it will say that there are some issues with the exam setup and they need to resolve it.

Assign points to the questions that I have added

After adding the questions into the exam, you can assign points to the questions.

The points stored on the question level can affect learner's score in the exam, especially in a multi-part question.

In the example below, the question consists of 2 response widgets, each with a score of 1. The total score of this question is 2 in the question bank.