A Practical Guide To Writing Quiz Questions
Most quiz questions test whether someone can remember a fact. Fewer test whether they actually understand it. In corporate training and education alike, this is a persistent problem; assessments feel thorough on paper but fail to reveal whether learners can apply what they have studied. The result is inflated pass rates and a false sense of confidence in the training program's effectiveness.
The good news is that writing better questions does not require a degree in psychometrics. It requires being more intentional about what each question is designed to measure and avoiding a few common traps that make questions easier to guess than to genuinely answer.
Creating Quiz Questions That Measure Understanding
Start With What You Want To Measure, Not What You Want To Ask
Before writing a single question, define the learning objective it maps to. This sounds obvious, but in practice, most quiz authors start with the content ("We covered phishing in module 3,") and write a question about a detail ("What percentage of breaches involve phishing?"). Those tests recall, not understanding.
A better approach is to ask yourself: What should the learner be able to do after completing this module? If the objective is "Identify suspicious emails," then the question should present a scenario—an email with subtle red flags—and ask the learner to evaluate it. The question tests the skill, not the statistic.
Avoid Questions That Can Be Answered Without Learning
Some question formats are so common that learners develop strategies for guessing correctly without knowing the material. Watch out for these patterns:
- "All of the above" as the correct answer.
Learners quickly notice that when "all of the above" appears, it is usually right. If you must use it, make sure it is sometimes wrong. - One answer that is obviously longer or more detailed than the others.
Quiz authors tend to put more effort into phrasing the correct answer, which makes it stand out. Keep all options at roughly the same length and level of detail. - Negatively worded questions like "Which of the following is NOT..."
These test attention more than knowledge. If you need to assess what something is not, reframe it as a positive question with a scenario. - True/False questions for nuanced topics.
Binary options give learners a 50% chance of guessing correctly. Reserve True/False for genuinely clear-cut facts, and use multiple choice or short answer for anything that requires judgment.
Write Plausible Distractors
The wrong answers in a multiple-choice question matter just as much as the right one. If the distractors are obviously wrong, the question becomes trivially easy regardless of how good the stem is.
Effective distractors come from real misconceptions. If you have been training people on a topic for a while, you already know the common mistakes—those are your distractors. For example, in a data privacy quiz, the question "When can you share customer data with a third party?" should include options that reflect actual misunderstandings, like "When the customer has made a purchase" or "When the third party signs a generic NDA." These feel plausible because they mirror real reasoning errors.
If you do not know the common misconceptions yet, run the quiz once and look at which wrong answers people pick most often. That data tells you where confusion lives.
Use Scenarios And Application Questions
The simplest way to move from recall to understanding is to put the learner in a situation. Instead of asking "What is the first step in the incident response process?", describe a specific incident and ask what should happen next. The learner has to recognize the situation, recall the process, and apply it, which is closer to what they would actually need to do on the job.
Scenario-based questions take longer to write, but they give you far more useful data about learner readiness. A learner who can recite the five steps of incident response but cannot identify which step applies to a given situation has not really learned the material.
Add Explanations To Every Answer
One of the most underused features in quiz design is the explanation field. When a learner gets an answer wrong, showing the correct answer alone does not help them understand why they were wrong. An explanation that briefly addresses the misconception behind each distractor turns the assessment into a learning moment.
This is especially valuable in self-paced training where there is no instructor to provide context. Even for correct answers, a short explanation reinforces the reasoning. "Correct. You'd escalate to the security team because the indicators suggest an active breach, not just a policy violation." is more valuable than a green checkmark.
Keep The Language Simple And Precise
Ambiguous wording is the enemy of a good assessment. If a learner gets a question wrong because they interpreted it differently than you intended, the question has failed—not the learner.
Avoid double negatives, vague qualifiers like "sometimes" or "usually," and jargon that was not explicitly taught in the training. Each question should have exactly one defensibly correct answer. If you find yourself writing a long justification for why one option is "more correct" than another, the question needs rewriting.
Have someone outside the subject matter review the questions before publishing. Fresh eyes catch ambiguity that the author cannot see.
Measure, Then Improve
Writing good questions is iterative. After your quiz has been taken by a meaningful number of learners, review the data. Questions where nearly everyone gets the right answer are not necessarily good—they might just be too easy. Questions with an even spread across all options might be poorly worded rather than genuinely difficult.
Look at the discrimination index: do high-performing learners get this question right more often than low-performing learners? If not, the question is not measuring what you think it is.
The goal is not to make quizzes harder. It is to make them more honest about what learners actually know, so you can focus your training effort where it matters most.
