Different Types of Quizzes: Ultimate Guide (With Examples)

Online quizzes are a rage these days. No, we’re not talking just about BuzzFeed quizzes. They sure are one of the most popular categories of online quizzes, but there are several other types of quizzes worth knowing.

Online quizzes can have diverse question formats, scoring patterns, and uses. 

The type of quiz you select depends on the audience, the topic, and even the platform you will share it on.

After reading this article, you’ll become familiar with the various quiz and question types so you can create the best online quizzes to meet your requirements. We’ll also peek into the process of creating an online quiz.

Let’s begin.

Types of Quizzes

Quizzes can be broadly categorized into two categories depending on the type of results they give: scored quizzes and personality quizzes. 

Quizzes that lead the quiz taker to a final score are referred to as scored quizzes. Those that lead the quiz taker to an outcome based on the answer options chosen by them are called personality quizzes. Let’s now look at what each type of quiz is all about.

Personality Quizzes

If you’re an avid Facebook scroller, you may have come across quizzes with titles, such as:

“Take This Quiz, and We’ll Tell You What Fruit You Are” 

“Do You Know Which Hogwarts House You Belong To?”

“This Quiz Will Reveal the Age at Which You’ll Find Your Soulmate” 

Such quizzes that let you discover new information about yourself are called personality quizzes.

Features of a personality quiz:

• Each question has multiple answer choices.
• Every answer choice correlates to one or more personalities. 
• At the end of the quiz, the personality with the most correlated options is revealed as the outcome. 

The fact that personality quizzes let quiz takers learn something new about themselves makes them a popular and highly shared type of content on social media. 

They’re highly engaging, and you can use them for various purposes. For example, you can use personality quizzes for lead generation, increasing website traffic, promoting affiliate products, and more.

You can also use personality quizzes for hiring. Recruiters use them to assess job candidates’ personality traits to find out if their values align with the company’s work culture and if they are a good fit for the role they’re applying for. 

Watch: How to Create a Personality Quiz

Scored Quizzes

Scored quizzes aren’t far behind in popularity from personality quizzes. They can be used to test knowledge on any topic and serve various purposes, such as skill testing for hiring, training needs assessment, fun quizzes for marketing, and more.

Features of a scored quiz:

• Each question is awarded specific points. 
• The scores keep adding up as the quiz taker progresses through the quiz. 
• At the end of the quiz, the sum of the points is revealed as the final result and it’s used to decide whether the quiz taker has passed or failed. 

Scored quizzes are flexible in terms of the types of questions you can add and how you can grade them. You can use a single question type throughout the quiz or mix and match various formats to make your quiz more engaging. You can pre-score quiz questions with various grading options, including custom grading, partial grading, negative markings, etc. You can also provide instant feedback for correct/incorrect answers to create a learning opportunity for your quiz takers.

Types of Online Quizzes Based on Their Use

You can classify online quizzes into the following categories based on what they’re used for:

Assessment Quizzes

Online assessment quizzes are used to test knowledge, skills, cognitive abilities, or personality traits. They are useful in various settings, such as:

• Trainers can use them to conduct training needs analysis and measure the effectiveness of their training courses. 
• Teachers can use them to assess knowledge gaps and learning progress and conduct exams securely. 
• Recruiters can use them to simplify their recruitment process and hire smarter and faster. 

Regarding recruitment, assessment quizzes are conducted in both scored and personality formats; the format you choose depends on your requirements. If you need to filter candidates based on their role-specific competency, you can create a scored quiz to test the candidates’ knowledge and skills. On the other hand, if you want to determine if a screened-in candidate would fit well in your company’s culture, you can conduct a pre-employment personality test. 

Pro Tip: Instead of creating pre-hire assessment quizzes from scratch, you can pick professionally designed and ready-to-use quizzes from an assessment library. Doing so saves time and ensures you conduct a comprehensive assessment.

Knowledge Quizzes 

Knowledge quizzes are scored quizzes that help reinforce knowledge of a particular topic or subject. Anyone who instructs a group of people can create knowledge quizzes to complement their educational efforts and help learners understand and retain information.

Teachers can create knowledge quizzes that students can take after they are taught a new topic. Similarly, corporate trainers can create such quizzes for employee onboarding and training programs. 

Knowledge quizzes differ from assessments in that they are more formative, meaning they need to be highly engaging.

For example, knowledge quizzes may feature a variety of media and interactive question types. They may also automatically award custom certificates to learners to reward and motivate them.

Watch: How to Create Custom Certificates 

Lead Generation Quizzes

As the name suggests, lead generation quizzes help businesses find prospective customers.

While most lead generation quizzes you’ll find online are personality quizzes, you can turn any quiz into a lead quiz. All you have to do is customize a lead generation form and put it in your quiz to capture your quiz-takers’ information, such as their names, email addresses, etc. 

A typical lead generation form created with an online quiz maker looks like this:

Lead quizzes make it easy to get qualified leads. What’s more? You can integrate your lead quiz with top marketing automation tools and make the whole lead management process 10x better.

Watch: How to Grow Your Business 10x with Lead Quizzes

Pro Tip: When making a quiz for social media marketing, create upbeat quiz results and add social share buttons on your quiz results page. Doing so improves their shareability and potential for lead generation.

Also, make sure you create an attractive cover for your quiz to boost participation. Here’s an example:

Fun Quizzes

Lastly, you can create various types of quizzes for fun. For example, you can:

• Create a trivia quiz to test your friends’ knowledge and compare results.
• Create a personality quiz for Facebook or any other social media platform.
• Host quizzes on pop culture, company history, and other fun topics during virtual meet-ups with your team. 
• Include quizzes in your fun classroom activities. 

Fun quizzes bring in a ton of engagement, whether you’re using them to engage employees, students, or online audiences.

Want to learn how to make a fun quiz?

Check out this quick guide.

So, those were the various types of quizzes you can create online. Now let’s look at the various question formats you can use for your online quizzes. 

Types of Quiz Questions

Online quiz tools let you ask questions in a wide range of formats. They include: 

1. Multiple Choice 

The multiple-choice question format is the most widely used format for both personality and scored quizzes. In a scored quiz, a multiple-choice question presents two or more answer options, of which only one is correct. 

But in the case of a personality quiz, there is no such concept of right or wrong answers. The answer options are correlated to different quiz outcomes.

With multiple-choice questions, it’s also possible to present questions and answers with images and videos. 

You can also present a video first and then ask your question. For example, check out this quiz that tests quiz-takers’ attention to detail. 

Matching 

Matching is another engaging format used in online quizzes. Matching questions can cover a lot of content and be presented with images too. 

You can frame matching questions in different ways—for instance, word to image, image to word, word to phrases, or more. 

Tip: You can even add extra matches to make it harder!

Watch: How to Create a Matching Quiz

True or False 

True or false is among the simplest and most often seen quiz question formats. It presents a statement followed by two answer options that are generally “True” & “False” or “Yes” & “No”. Quiz takers choose one of the two options.

Like multiple-choice questions, True or False questions can also be used for both personality and scored quizzes.

Watch: How to Create a True or False Quiz

Checkbox (aka Multiple-Response)

Quite similar to the multiple-choice question format, checkbox questions also present more than one answer choice. The only difference is that quiz takers can select more than one answer option in checkbox questions. 

For scored quizzes, this means that there can be more than one correct answer. 

Here’s an example.

Fill-in-the-Blanks

In this question format, the quiz takers need to fill in the missing words and/or phrases in a statement. Quiz takers can type in their answers in the blank boxes.

Here’s a quick tutorial on How to Create a Fill-in-the-Blanks Quiz.

Hotspot 

Hotspot is an image-based and highly- interactive type of quiz for students and other types of quiz takers as well. In a hotspot question, you ask quiz takers to select a particular area on the image as their answer. You can, of course, adjust the size of the correct area while creating hotspot quiz questions. 

Hotspot format lets students demonstrate their knowledge via visual identification and is great for knowledge retention.

Watch: How to Create a Hotspot Quiz

Dropdown

In a dropdown question, the quiz takers are presented with two or more answer options, just like the multiple-choice question type. But, unlike the multiple-choice question, the dropdown question type has the answer options hidden in a dropdown list that opens when clicked. Quiz takers can choose from the list and submit their answer.

Essay Format

The essay-type quiz format follows a free-response model. Mostly used in scored quizzes, the essay format is suitable when you need to get detailed, descriptive, and lengthy answers.

The question is followed by a box (as shown in the image below) where the quiz takers write their answers. You can use this format to assess how deeply the learners have understood a topic. 

Tip: You can set a character limit and/or a time limit for your essay questions to make them more challenging and engaging. 

Video Response

The video-response quiz question format is one of the most engaging types as it doesn’t require the quiz takers to type in their answers. They can respond to the question by recording a video in real time or uploading a previously recorded one. 

This question type can be used to create the most engaging quizzes for different purposes. For instance: 

• Recruiters can use it to conduct remote interviews.
• Teachers can use it to let their students present their ideas & projects.
• Trainers can use it to assess learners’ understanding.
• Brands can request their customers to record testimonials.

Tip: You can choose to let quiz takers respond only by recording in real-time, only by uploading, or both. 

Video response questions where you only accept responses recorded in real-time work amazingly well as an anti-cheating measure. You can also set a recording limit and number of allowed reattempts for such questions.  

This is how a video response question would appear in a quiz. 

Watch: How to Create a Video Quiz

Other Online Quiz Question Formats

Order List: Quiz takers drag and drop items in a list to arrange them in the correct sequence

Type-in: Quiz takers type in their answer in a textbox.

Comprehension: Quiz takers read a passage and then answer questions based on it

Audio-Response: Quiz takers answer an open-ended question by recording or uploading an audio clip

Watch: 15+ Question Types for Online Learning & Assessment

Here’s an example of a quiz that features various quiz question formats.

So, now you know all about the different types of quizzes. It’s time to quickly look at how you can create a quiz online. 

How to Create Online Quizzes

Here are five easy steps to create quizzes online for any requirement.  

Step 1: Choose what type of quiz you want to make 

Step 2: Pick a template or create from scratch

Step 3: Create questions or import them from the question bank

Step 4: Customize the look, settings, and results

Watch: How to Customize & Configure Your Quiz Settings

Step 5: Share/assign the quiz using a link, website embed, or virtual classroom 

Watch: How to Share Your Quiz With Learners

If you’re creating a personality quiz, you’ll also need to set up the different personality-based outcomes and map answer options to them.

Something to remember if you’re creating an exam or assessment – Configure these settings to prevent cheating and unauthorized access. 

• Enable proctoring 
• Enable password-protection
• Randomize the order of questions
• Shuffle answer options
• Disable tab switching

Watch: How to Create an Online Quiz in Under 5 Mins

 If you’d like to learn more about creating quizzes online, you can check out our in-depth quiz-making guide.

Get. Set. Quiz!

This was a roundup of the different types and formats of online quizzes that you can create using online quiz software. Whatever quiz type you choose, you’ll need good quiz software to create quizzes that are engaging, easy to build, and helpful in achieving your goals.

ProProfs lets you create all kinds of quizzes quickly and easily. It features the simplest interface and is equipped with all the quiz-making features you’ll need, including 100+ settings & customizations, 100+ professionally-designed assessments & templates, a library of a million ready questions, and lots more.