Most lists of WordPress quiz plugins are lists of quiz makers. They are built to score a visitor once, show a result and maybe collect an email. That is a fine job, and it is not the one a course needs.
A quiz inside a course belongs to a student, a lesson and a record. It has to decide whether someone passed, how many tries they get, what they see afterwards and whether the next lesson opens. If you are choosing a quiz plugin for a course, those are the questions to ask, and this post is the checklist, with what Learnomy actually does for each one.
Questions: what types, and where they live
Learnomy Free ships six question types: multiple choice with one correct answer, multiple choice with several, true or false, short answer, fill in the blank and essay. That covers most knowledge checks.
Eventually a course wants more. Learnomy Pro adds matching, ordering, numeric answers, math expressions and calculated questions, where the numbers in the question stem change per attempt.
The questions themselves live in a central bank rather than inside a single quiz, and a quiz uses them as slots. So one good question can appear in several quizzes. If a plugin stores questions inside each quiz, check what happens when you want to reuse them.
The question bank in practice
Questions live in a bank, so it pays to treat it like a library. Each question has a type, a category, a difficulty from one to five that defaults to three, an explanation shown with feedback and a status. The bank page lists every question with how many quizzes use it. You can duplicate a question to make a variation, filter by category and difficulty, or delete in bulk. A deleted question is removed from any quiz that used it, so check the Times Used column first.
If you already have questions in a spreadsheet, the bank has Import CSV and Export CSV in its header. The import expects these columns: title, type, difficulty, category_slug, status, hint, body_text and answers_json. Export a few existing questions first and use that file as your template, which is quicker than writing the answers column by hand.
The pass mark and the attempt rules
This is where a quiz stops being a form. Each Learnomy quiz has:
- a passing score, 70 percent by default
- an optional time limit
- an attempt limit, where zero means unlimited
- a cooldown between attempts
- a cap on failed attempts, after which the student is locked out and told to contact the instructor
- an access code, and an open and close window
Two details matter more than they look. First, if a student can take a quiz several times, the plugin has to say which attempt counts. In Learnomy you choose which attempt counts, for example the highest or the latest. Second, a new quiz in the editor starts at one attempt, so if you want retakes you have to decide to allow them. For the one-student-needs-one-more-try case, letting one student retake a quiz covers the override without loosening the rule for everyone.
What students see after they answer
Feedback timing is a setting people overlook until a student shares the answers in a group chat. Learnomy offers six choices for when answers and explanations appear:
- immediately, as soon as the answer is chosen
- after each question
- after the whole quiz is submitted (the default)
- after the attempt is finalized, which includes manual grading
- only after passing, so those who pass see a full review and the rest see just a score
- never
“Only after passing” is the one to look at if you reuse the same questions across retakes. Navigation is a separate choice: students can either jump between questions or move through them one at a time with no going back.
You can also shuffle the order of questions and the order of answers, so two students sitting side by side do not see the same paper.
Grading, including the essays
Multiple choice and true or false grade themselves. Essays do not, and a course quiz needs a clear answer for them.
In Learnomy an attempt that contains an essay stays at “Submitted” until a grader scores it. The grader scores each response and can leave feedback on it, and once every response has a score the attempt finalizes and becomes “Graded”. The pass or fail result is worked out as a percentage against the pass mark.
Pro adds rubric grading for essays, so a grader scores against named criteria with their own points and weights instead of one number. That is useful once more than one person is marking.
How a quiz affects the course
A quiz plugin that cannot influence progress is a quiz maker again. Two settings tie it to the course:
- A lesson can be set to require passing a quiz before the student can complete it. The lesson tells them: “Pass the quiz to complete this lesson.”
- Each quiz runs in one of three modes. Graded is the normal one and counts. Practice and survey quizzes do not count toward course completion, and a survey is always counted as satisfied once submitted, so it can never block anyone.
Practice mode also skips the failed-attempt cap, which is what you want for a self-test that students are meant to repeat.
Taking a serious exam
For an assessment where integrity matters, there are a few tools, and it helps to be clear about what they are.
Learnomy can record each time a student switches browser tabs during a quiz. The count is kept on the server and incremented there, so a student cannot reset it by sending a different number. You can set it to submit the attempt automatically after a chosen number of switches. The default is zero, which means it never auto-submits.
The player also saves where a student is, including their current question, the questions they flagged and their remaining time, so a student whose connection drops can pick up where they were. The time a student took is measured from the server clock rather than reported by the browser.
None of this is a webcam or a locked-down browser. It records tab switches. That makes it a good deterrent and a useful signal for a grader, and a poor basis for accusing anyone. If your exams carry real stakes, say so in your quiz instructions and decide what a high count should mean before you see one.
Pro goes further for long exams. It adds random question pools drawn fresh for each attempt, countdowns on individual questions, rules that show a question only when an earlier one was answered a certain way, and extra layouts: sectioned exams where each section is timed and submitted in turn, a conversational layout for quick knowledge checks, and a review layout with a question map for long certification exams. Free includes the focused layout, one question at a time, and the classic layout, the whole paper on one page.
Three common setups
The settings above combine differently depending on what the quiz is for.
A lesson check. Use practice mode, so it never counts toward completion, allow unlimited attempts and show feedback immediately. Students learn from it and nobody is locked out.
A graded module test. Use graded mode with the pass mark you choose, a small attempt limit, feedback after submit or only after passing, and shuffled questions and answers. Make the lesson require a pass if the quiz should gate the next step.
A certification exam. Add a time limit, sequential navigation, tab tracking with an auto-submit limit, a cooldown between attempts and a cap on failed attempts. Consider the review board layout in Pro for a long paper, since it adds a question map. Whichever you pick, tell students the rules before they start, because a quiz that surprises people with a lockout generates more support requests than any feature you can name.
One habit catches more problems than any checklist: take your own quiz as a student before you publish it. Open it in a private window, watch the timer, switch tabs once to see what gets recorded, and read the results screen. It takes ten minutes, and it shows you exactly what your students will experience.
A checklist you can carry to any plugin
When you evaluate a quiz plugin for a course, ask:
- Can a quiz belong to a lesson, and can that lesson require a pass?
- Is there a pass mark, an attempt limit and a rule for which attempt counts?
- Can you control when answers are revealed?
- Who grades essays, and what state is an attempt in while it waits?
- Can a practice quiz exist without affecting completion?
- What does the plugin record about how the quiz was taken?
If the answer to most of those is “no”, you have a quiz maker, and it will be a source of workarounds the first time a real student asks to retake something.
Where to look next
The quizzes and grading page walks through how this looks to a student and an instructor, and Free vs Pro shows exactly which of the features above need Pro. The documentation has a page for each setting.