The Art of Making Quizzes Slightly Less Terrible

I’ll be honest – when I was thinking about what to title this article, I went to ChatGPT for help. Originally, my prompt to ChatGPT read as such, “I want to write an article about creating quizzes that students don’t hate. What are some fun title options?” There were good options presented, but a few honestly made me laugh. “Turning Quizzes from Dreaded to Desired” and “From Groans to Grins: Transforming Quizzes into Student Favorites” were my two favorites.

ChatGPT didn’t seem to understand that no matter what instructors do, students will likely never ‘desire’ or ‘grin’ at the thought of quizzes. So, I went back to ChatGPT and rephrased my question – “I want to write an article about creating quizzes that students hate a little bit less than normal. What are some fun title options?” This led me to my title, which is a little more appropriate for what I believe I was recently able to do with quizzes in my course, HLTH 325: Exercise Physiology.

I wasn’t naïve enough to believe I could create quizzes that students enjoyed, but I think (and hope) that I was able to create quizzes that were slightly less terrible.

Before the class started, I was brainstorming ways to promote attendance. HLTH 325 met only once a week, so I wanted to find a way to encourage students to attend. I decided to use weekly quizzes to promote attendance, while also supporting student learning. Frequent low-stakes quizzes are demonstrated to be effective for promoting long-term retention of knowledge (Yang et al., 2021; Sotola & Crede, 2021). The more class content is tested, the larger the learning gains. In fact, low-stakes testing is shown to produce higher scores on a final exam than high-stakes testing (Hinze & Rapp, 2014).

However, I remember how much I hated quizzes when I was an undergrad. They always seemed to promote anxiety, even if they weren’t worth that many points in the larger context of the course. This led me to ask myself the question, “How can I make these quizzes less terrifying and less anxiety-inducing?” Here’s what I came up with:

• Students would take a quiz each week at the end of class
• Quizzes would be worth 10 points each (16.7% of their total grade)
• 1/3 would be individual quizzes, 1/3 small group (2-3 students), and 1/3 with the entire class
• Majority vote would decide the type of quiz each week
• The bottom two quiz scores for each student would be dropped

I was hoping to accomplish a few specific things by structuring the quizzes in this way:

1. I wanted to use the quizzes as an informal attendance policy. If a student wasn’t in class when we took the quiz, they would receive a 0 on the quiz for the day. Therefore, students could miss two quizzes (two classes) for whatever reason (i.e., sickness, mental health, etc.) and not have their grade suffer. Overall, I do believe this promoted attendance. My attendance rate sat at around 95% for the entire semester. In previous classes where I didn’t implement weekly quizzes, my attendance rate was closer to 80-85% for the semester.
2. I wanted to provide corrective feedback during quizzes to promote the benefit of frequent content testing. In the currently discussed course, I used Mentimeter, which allows for me to provide real-time feedback during the quiz. If several students missed a particular question, I was able to explain the correct answer in the moment. Additionally, this format encouraged students to ask follow-up questions if they were confused by a question.
3. I wanted to use the quizzes to ensure student attention to the course material. When I was an undergraduate, I remember disengaging from courses when I knew I could just learn the material on my own time. By having quizzes at the end of each class, students were gently nudged (i.e., somewhat forced) to pay attention in class.
4. I wanted to give grace to the students. I was a student once too, and I know how stressful quizzes could be (even if they were worth only 5% of your total grade). For the students, I wanted them to feel a bit of this stress without the overwhelming dread that quizzes often cause. My hope was that it was calming and anxiety-reducing for the students to know 1) that they could drop their two lowest quiz grades and 2) 2/3^rds of the quizzes were with a group or the entire class.

Overall, I would say that this method of quizzes was successful for this class. I’ve included a graph below that shows how the students did on the different types of quizzes (I removed the 0s that occurred due to student absences). On their own, students averaged quiz scores in the low-80s; with a group, students averaged quiz scores in the mid-90s; with the entire class, students averaged a quiz score of 100. After dropping the lowest two scores for each student, the average for all the students and all the quizzes was a 95.2%.

It makes sense that the students performed best when they were able to work together as a group. This format also likely lessened the psychological burden for students that don’t consider themselves ‘good test-takers’ (Hinze & Rapp, 2014). These students no longer had to fret or worry as much about their quiz grades, as only 1/3^rd of the quiz grade was based on their individual performance. This ideally allowed for students to focus more on learning for the sake of learning rather than learning for the sake of a quiz or test.

At the end of the day, I hope I was able to make quizzes slightly less terrible for the thirteen students in my HLTH 325 course. Quizzes may never be desired or grin-inspiring, but hopefully we can work together as instructors to develop ways to make them more bearable.