Are you teaching in a school that recently went 1:1 or is about to go 1:1? Do you hate stacks of paper burying your desk after you give students a test? Do you want students to take tests on their devices? Do you hate it when your school’s photocopier jams? Do you want to reduce cheating on assessments?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, read on. This is a visual tutorial for making an assessment with Google Forms. By the end of this post, you should be able to create an assessment and add questions from assessments you have in Microsoft Word and Google Doc formats. In part 2, I show you how to automatically grade paperless assessments in Google Forms.
To get started creating a Google Form, go to the Google Drive folder where you want to store the form and:
Checking “Shuffle question order” means the questions will appear in a different order for each student taking the test. This makes cheating during the test very difficult.
My students use HP Chromebooks. The touchpads are sensitive. This causes students to accidentally submit forms before they have answered all questions. Making each question required prevents forms from being submitted until all questions have been answered.
Now that you have started entering questions into your form, here’s a suggestion: get rid of all numbers for the questions and letters for the answer choices. Those are relics of the Scantron era. In part 2, I will show you how to automatically grade your assessment. You won’t need numbers or letters. The absence of letters and numbers makes cheating harder. Additionally, to tell another student an answer, a cheater would have to state the question and the answer. Instead of saying “2 is b,” a cheating student is re-teaching content!
Once you have entered your questions, get your form ready for students’ eyes:
Your form will open in a new tab.
After students have taken the assessment:
The answers, on a Google Sheet, appear in a new tab:
This is where I will end this post. Now you should be able to create a form and view answers. In the second post, I demonstrate how to use Flubaroo to easily grade the assessment and give students fast feedback. If you have any questions about Google Forms for assessment, please comment below or send me a tweet at @tmullaney23.
Tom Mullaney 
Does this work on an iPad? The + link only brings up documents, spreadsheet and presentations with no “more” button. Also, I don’t see any forms tab on the Spreadsheet.
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Full disclosure: I make my Google Forms on my Chromebook. Before the Chromebook, I made them using a Windows machine. My students use Chromebooks. I imagine students could probably answer a Google Form on an iPad but I am not sure you can make a Google Form using an iPad.
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When I copy/paste answers into the the first field (Option 1), they just stay in that field for me. What am I doing wrong? Great tutorial and really looking forward to Part 2. I have been using Google Forms and Flubaroo for testing/marking all semester, but never used Shuffle Questions option because I didn’t know how would Flubaroo sort them out. Thanks!
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Irena, Flubaroo doesn’t care about the shuffle questions option. When you look at the report Flubaroo generates, it will show the questions in the order you entered them into the form.
I have not had that problem with copying and pasting answers. I use both the keyboard and right-click methods using a PC or Chromebook. Are you copying the question or a blank line of text as well? Maybe that causes a problem?
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Tom, thank you for a quick reply! I tested both and you are right! Multiple choice answers spread themselves nicely in separate fields on the Form! I don’t know what I was doing wrong before. Also, now I understand what you mean by questions in the order they are in the form. Thanks a lot!
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Irena, I’m so happy it worked for you!
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Tom, don’t the demographic questions get shuffled as well?
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They do. But it does not affect Flubaroo recognizing them.
It is odd that the 19th question a student answers is “Write your first name.” I just tell students that those questions will be mixed in before the first test. It’s not a big deal after that.
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When you add the demographic questions (name, period, etc.) how do you keep them from being scored when graded/scored by Flubaroo? Do you just mark these questions as “Not Required”…?
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Gary, I cover this in part 2 of this post. See link below. When grading with Flubaroo, set demographic questions to “Identifies Student.”
https://tommullaney.com/2015/05/13/make-paperless-assessment-with-google-forms-part-2-of-2-grading-with-flubaroo/
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If you don’t care if your students are cheating, Google Forms and Flubaroo make a great combination. If you need your student’s email addresses so you can email grades back after Flubaroo grades them, be aware that your students are having the entire assessment and the answers emailed to them and are sharing those answers with other classes. Google has been aware of the problem at least since 2014 and still hasn’t corrected it.
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Kim, thank you for your comment. I disagree. Here is some language I used to argue this is not a problem in another blog post:
“Without pencils and ScanTron sheets, multiple choice questions no longer need numbers and letters. This means that post-test cheating becomes a discussion of content.
Rather than a cheating student telling another, “Question 4 is C,” they would say, “You need to know the Democrats were the group most likely to oppose Henry Clay’s American System.” Students are simply conveying content in that scenario. All teachers want students discussing content with each other beyond the classroom walls.”
Further, teachers should e-mail full answer keys for transparency and so that students can review. Teachers can always use File–>Make a Copy to easily make different versions of the same test. Question wording and choices can easily be changed for make-up tests and to vary the tests slightly from year-to-year and semester-to-semester.
Link to the blog post I quoted: http://www.imagineeasy.com/blog/ed-tech-tools-for-multiple-choice/
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This is a nice tutorial. Do you know of any way to upload the entire questions and answers at once into the google forms though? Say I have a question bank of 100 questions and i’d like to import them all at once from excel or word without having to go through the question, then answers format as above. Any suggestions?
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I don’t know of that capability. The best I can tell you is that when you copy all answer choices from a Google Doc or Microsoft Word and paste them in the first answer field, it automatically populates into separate answer fields. When I saw that, I was sold on Google Forms.
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