Using Microsoft Copilot to create Quizzes in Microsoft Forms

How I used Copilot to create a geography quiz with Forms

I am not a teacher but I can relate to their professional lives especially the fact that there is never enough time.? One of the promises that AI proclaims to deliver is “time”. Much has been said about using AI to create tests and assessments. One of the tools I use a lot is Microsoft Forms, which allows me to create online quizzes and surveys easily and quickly. This week I noticed a new button that said “Quick import” that proclaimed to make it possible to import questions from a word document.?

What if I could use Copilot to create questions in a format that would import and what if I could somehow mark one of the answers in such a way as to make it make it easy to identify the correct answer. So I started to play.

After some failed attempts – it’s all about the prompt you know – I settled on the following.

“Create 25 multiple choice questions on the topic of A level Geography for 17 year old students. Title it “Geography Quiz” and append "*" to the end of the right answers”        

Entering this prompt gave me a great set of questions in an appropriate format to make them suitable for import into Forms using the quick import button. The resulting generated questions were saved as a Word document.

Switching to Forms, I selected the quick import button, and then pointed the “Import your file” prompt to the newly created word document.? Once done, I selected the quiz option, and the magic began to happen.

I was greeted with the words “Your quiz has been converted successfully”.

As good as that is, there is still a little bit of work to do. Select the Review Quiz option then the “add correct answers and points values” text on the right of the screen. Conveniently, all the right answers have an “*” appended to them so select these as the correct answer and then remove the “*” (that would make it too easy). Also add a points value. I selected “1” for all mine.

Once done for all questions, preview the quiz to ensure that it produces the expected results.

Now given that I want to use this quiz to assist learning and not test for knowledge retention, I also opted to take advantage of the other options in Forms to enable the new “Practice mode”. This is actually great as students get instant feedback on their answer allowing them to learn as opposed to waiting for feedback from elsewhere. To make the quiz less susceptible to cheating, I also opted to shuffle all the questions.

I opted not to add a timer, but I could have done for an extra bit of focus.

Previewing the form again confirmed that the students would receive feedback on their incorrect answers and praise on the right ones – winner!

Once I was happy, I selected “Collect responses” and provided the link to the dummy students to check that all worked as expected.

With the configuration that I selected, the student got 100% even though they needed to take several attempts on some of the questions. The score isn’t actually the point though, as throughout the quiz, they learned the right answers by selecting incorrect answers and receiving feedback. At some point in the future, the quiz options can be revised to remove the practice option which will give an indication of how much knowledge has been assimilated.

So my little project to explore how Copilot can save time has been a success and I’ll be using this in the near future on a teacher training session to show busy teachers how they can work smarter not harder using AI.

Thanks for reading.

Additional notes:

By editing the prompt,

- Copilot can help you generate diverse and relevant questions based on the curriculum and your comments, saving you time and effort.

- Copilot can also help you provide feedback and hints for incorrect answers, enhancing the learning experience for the students.

- Copilot can suggest different levels of difficulty and complexity for the questions, allowing you to differentiate and challenge the students according to their needs.