Online quizzes and tests can benefit both students and instructors. Online quizzes and tests generally are automatically graded as soon as students submit their responses, providing immediate feedback for students and reducing grading time for instructors. Often, the quizzes and tests are "practice," with the results revealed only to the student taking the quiz or test, but some programs automatically record the grades students receive or send the results to the instructor via e-mail.

Other People's Quizzes
If you search the Web, you should be able to find some quizzes and tests prepared by others that you could use in your classes. An excellent example can be found at Guide to Grammar and Writing, from Charles Darlings and Capital Community-Technical College (Hartford, Connecticut). If you click on "Quizzes" in the bottom frame of the opening page, you will find a page linking 152 online practice quizzes (as of June 6, 1999). Some textbook publishers are also offering online quizzes to accompany their textbooks. One examples is Prentice-Hall's Literature and the Writing Process (scroll down, select a chapter, and then select a quiz from the left side of the screen). Of course, always read the rules of usage for online quizzes produced by others, but, in general, there is nothing wrong with you linking or directing your students to these quizzes.

Free Quizzing Services
There are also a few free quizzing services, usually sponsored by universities, that allow instructors to use software stored on someone else's server to produce online quizzes. One example is the University of Hawaii's QuizCenter. You must register to use this free service, but this service allows you to produce online quizzes without having to download or invest in any quizzing software.

Other Quizzing Programs
The University of Hawaii also provides an extensive list of links to Other Quiz Programs. The programs vary greatly, in terms of cost, in terms of how easy they are to use, and in terms of what they can do. You might spend a little time exploring some of these online programs linked from the University of Hawaii's site. You can also find a few quizzing programs at the Education section of CNET Download.com, most of them under "Teaching Tools."

CNET Builder.com's Free Quiz Creator
CNET Builder.com offers a free quiz creator that you can use to produce practice true/false or multiple-choice quizzes with your own questions and answers (scroll down and click on "Quiz Creator" under "Cool Tools). You simply fill in the blanks with your questions and answers and mark the correct answers. Quiz Creator then creates the code for your quiz, which you can copy and paste into an html editor such as FrontPage.

To copy the code from Quiz Creator, highlight the entire code and press [C] while holding down the [Control] key. To copy the code into a FrontPage document, open a new page in Editor, click on "Html" near the bottom left of the page, place your cursor at the beginning of the page, and press [V] while holding down the [Control] key. Clicking on "Normal" in the bottom left allows you to see what the quiz will look like online, although you will have to view the quiz in a web browser to see how it works. After creating the quiz, you should name and save the file just as you would with any FrontPage document.

The quizzes you make in Quiz Creator are practice quizzes. The quizzes are graded automatically for students, but you do not see the results. 

The college has not yet invested in any online quizzing program or programs, but we are starting to talk about the possibilities. Please send me an e-mail message (at rrambo@theramp.net or rambo@ivcc.edu) if you use online quizzing or testing or if you know of a program that you think works especially well.