Quizzes
Quizzes are the barometers of any LMS, giving  you a direct measure of how your learners are responding to your elearning content and performing as students. A quiz is usually placed at the end of a Topic or a Unit, and subjects the learners to a series of questions to gauge how well they understood the content.
Quizzes are also an important indicator of how good an LMS really is, and are usually the most feature rich module of the system. If you plan to intensely quiz your learners, what you need is an LMS that has a robust and a feature-rich quizzing suite.
Quiz Pre-Requisites
Just like course and lesson pre-requisites, some plugins like Learndash let you choose a pre-requisite quiz that must be attempted before you are eligible to attempt the current quiz. This is useful when you do not want your users to be skipping quizzes associated with topics or lessons that they completed earlier, and ensure maximum retention.
Being a pretty basic feature, this option can be found on all the plugins on our comparison table except for Sensei.
Passing Percentage
Passing Percentages are the go-to feature when you want your learners to obtain a minimum score in the quiz to qualify as having passed the quiz. A learner will not be able to proceed to the next Topic/Unit unless he first clears the quiz.
All the LMSes on our list offer pass marks as a feature, although LearnDash takes it a notch higher by also having the associated setting of a Certificate threshold i.e the minimum marks a user must get to be able to receive a certificate. Case in point being when a user scores enough marks to pass the quiz but falls short to obtain a certificate.
Associations
Quizzes act like milestones within a courses, and are usually associated at the end of a lesson or unit. One can also get creative with course design and create variations of this arrange, like placing a quiz at the end of each module as compared to each lesson, or maybe have just one comprehensive quiz at the end of the course.
LearnDash let’s you associate quizzes with a Course, Lesson or a Topic right on the quiz creation page, while plugins like Sensei and LifterLMS opt for a different approach and will have an option to add quiz question while you’re adding content to a Lesson.
WP Courseware is probably the fastest in this respect. The drag and drop course organizer page will present you with a metabox full on unassociated quizzes, all you would need to do is drag the quiz and place it in a Course Unit of your choice.
Randomization
Randomization within quizzes is absolutely essential to the system, for the simple reason that a user may quickly identify a pattern while answering question in a quiz, and may use unfair means to score higher that what he/she actually can.
Randomization applies to both the order of questions, and to the selectable options for a particular question. Ideally, a smart quiz should never display the question in a particular order twice, and should always randomize the placement of options within a question. This ensures that the system is foolproof.
LearnDash and Sensei are the only plugins to feature options to randomize both the order of questions and the answer options. WP Courseware will just let you randomize the selectable options for an answer, but the order of questions remains the same and LifterLMS also follows suit.
Quiz Timers
One of the most common features of any Quiz is the time limit associated with it. And it’s no different on WordPress. LearnDash, WP Courseware and LifterLMS feature an option to time your quizzes. Noticeably absent from the list is Sensei, it does not offer support for timers of any kind.
Quiz Re-take
What happens when your learners do not meet the passing criteria of a quiz in the first attempt? Do you block them from taking the quiz again? Or would you like them to have another couple of chances to pass the quiz? Is there going to be a limit to the number of attempts?
Questions like these are taken care of by the Quiz Retake feature, which lets you decide if a learner can re attempt a particular quiz. LearnDash and Sensei present the option in the form of a checkbox that, if ticked/unticked, will limit the number of attempts to just one. With LearnDash, you can set the attempt limit for registered users only or anonymous users only. However you cannot set the number of limits to anyone particular number.
If you’re looking to set a particular number of attempts for a quiz, say a maximum of 3 or 4 attempts, both WP Courseware and LifterLMS feature the capability to do so.
Quiz Import/Export
A feature often requested by individuals and organizations with a medium-to-large scale implementation is import/export of quizzes to and from the LMS system. The ability to import questions and quizzes directly to your system saves you a ton of time by eliminating the need to repeatedly go through the process of creating questions and quizzes for your Courses. One would just need to add all the specifics of a quiz/question into a spreadsheet file and simply import it into the system, and that’s it.
This is an advanced feature, and is available only in a handful of plugins. From our list of WordPress plugins, only LearnDash and WP Courseware will let you import quiz and question data, which is especially handy when you want to add a lot of quizzes to your courses.
Question Points & Grading
Having a points system for your quiz questions let’s you quantify you courses into well defined sets of quiz questions and makes for easy assessment of the learners. The ability to change the weightage of each question is an added onus, one can easily assign a high weightage of points to the questions that need extra efforts to answer; like that of a assignment upload question type.
Combine that with a variety of question types and a Leaderboards system and you have the most complete and flexible quizzing module you could build on WordPress. Just like LearnDash.
Question Types
Having an option to choose from various question types makes our job as an instructor much easier, and adds to the flexibility of your quizzes. Different question types will let you test your learners in more than just the standard multiple choice way, and effectively helps in assessment of various skills.
LearnDash and WP Courseware make the most out of this avenue. Both are known to support a variety of question types along with multiple choice question, like filling in the blanks, open ended answers etc. that require manual grading.
Feature Comparison Table
Features | LearnDash | WP Courseware | LifterLMS | Sensei |
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Questions Pre-requisites |
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Passing Percentage |
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Randomization |
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Quiz Timers |
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Quiz Retake |
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Quiz Import |
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Question Type – Multiple Choice |
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Question Type – Open Ended |
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Question Type – Fill The Blank |
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Question Type – True/False |
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Question Type – File Upload |
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Question Hints |
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Question Tags |
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Message For Right/Wrong Answer |
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Overall Rating | 5/5 | 4.5/5 | 3/5 | 3.5/5 |