How to turn a PDF or your notes into a quiz in 2 minutes

The material is already good. The chapter PDF, the notes you teach from, the worksheet you wrote two years ago and have watched three cohorts do — you know exactly which question separates the students who understand from the students who have memorised a procedure.

That is the expensive part, and it is done. What stops it becoming a quiz for your class is not pedagogy. It is twenty minutes of retyping, plus the fiddly business of turning question 4 into something with clickable options.

Here is the version of that job that takes two minutes, and the four things worth checking before you assign it to anyone.

Where the work actually is

It helps to see the shape of it. Three of the four stages are cheap. One is not, and it is the one only you can do.

Start from the file, not from a blank page

If the material exists as a PDF or a Word file — a textbook chapter, your lesson notes, last year’s worksheet — upload that, up to 30 MB. The questions come back as a draft written from what is on the page — its wording, its numbers, its worked examples — with the answer options already written out for you to edit. A digital source is always better than a photograph of the same thing, because nothing has to be inferred from pixels.

Making a quiz from your notes rather than a worksheet

Notes and worksheets give the generator different jobs. A worksheet already contains questions, so the draft follows them. Notes and chapters contain explanations, so the questions are written from what is on the page — its definitions, its worked examples, its numbers — rather than from general knowledge about the topic. That is the difference between a quiz on fractions and a quiz on the fractions lesson you actually taught.

Two things help. Upload the notes for one lesson or one topic, not a whole term, so the quiz stays on what was taught this week. And if the notes do not make the level obvious, open “Add a level and subject” and type the grade: a worksheet usually says who it is for, and a page of notes often does not.

Photographing a page on paper

Much of what you teach from is on paper: a worksheet in a folder, notes in a binder, a page of the textbook. Photographing it works better than people expect, and it fails in boring, avoidable ways.

• Lay the page flat. A held page curves, and curved text lines are where character recognition falls apart.
• Get the whole page, including the instructions at the top. “Answer any five” and “show your working” are part of the question set, not decoration.
• Watch your own shadow. Standing directly over a page near a window puts a hard shadow across the middle. Step to the side.
• One page per photo. A spread photographed at an angle gives you two half-legible pages instead of one good one.

When there is nothing to upload

Sometimes there is nothing to upload, just the thing you are teaching on Thursday. Describing it works, and specificity is what separates a usable draft from filler. Compare:

• “fractions quiz”— eight generic questions pitched at nobody in particular.
• “Grade 7, simplifying fractions and comparing unlike denominators, 8 questions, mostly multiple choice, two word problems using everyday quantities, no decimals yet” — something you can actually use.

The second took eleven seconds to type. It is the highest-leverage eleven seconds in the process. The details that change the output most are the grade level, the number of questions, the mix of question types, and — most of all — what to leave out.

What converts well, and what fights back

Not everything wants to be a quiz on a screen. After doing this a few dozen times, the pattern is fairly consistent.

The four checks before you assign

This is the part that matters, and it is why a draft is a draft. A generated quiz is confident in a way that has nothing to do with being correct.

1. The answer key, on the questions you would get wrong at speed

Not all of them. Scan for the two or three that involve a conversion, a negative, or a unit, and verify those properly. Straightforward recall questions are rarely keyed wrong. Anything with arithmetic in two steps sometimes is.

2. Distractors that are accidentally correct

The classic: a multiple-choice question about simplifying where two of the four options simplify to the same value. A student picks the “wrong” one, is marked down, and is right.

This is the error that costs you the most, because the student who spots it is usually the strongest one in the room, and the lesson they take away is that the system is arbitrary.

3. Questions that assume something the student cannot see

If your worksheet had a diagram, a number line, or a table, the text of that question will often survive while the thing it refers to does not. “Using the diagram above, find x” is unanswerable on a screen with no diagram. Either delete it or rewrite it to carry its own information.

4. Reading level, especially in a second language

Generated questions drift towards a more formal register than most teachers use. If your class works in English as a second or third language, that drift is not neutral — it is a difficulty increase you did not intend, in a subject that is not English.

Read two questions out loud. If they sound like a textbook rather than like you, simplify them.

A draft you did not read is a worksheet you did not write.

The three routes, side by side

There is more than one way to turn what you already have into a quiz, and the right one depends on what that is. Retyping is not stupid — for eight questions it is faster than explaining what you want. It stops being sensible somewhere around question fifteen.

The row that is ours is marked, and it is not marked because it wins every column. A shared bank that already covers your syllabus beats every other route on this page, and if your school pays for one, use it. The case for the third row is narrower than that: it is the one that works when the material you have is the material you wrote.

Decide what help is allowed before you assign

The last decision is what students may use while they work: their notes, the textbook, a calculator, each other. For practice, most of that is fine and a stuck student keeps moving. For a quiz you mean to count, say plainly that it is closed-book and done alone.

Put it in the note you attach when you assign, and mark the quiz as practice or graded at the same time. Changing the rule once half the class has submitted is unfair to whichever half got the other one, and you will not be able to explain the marks afterwards.

The upload is worth more than the quiz

Here is the part that changes the arithmetic. The photograph you took is not only a quiz. Once the questions are drafted, the same material makes a revision deck, a set of notes, and a slide deck — each one a press, none of them another upload.

That matters because those three are jobs you were going to do anyway, badly, at a worse time. The revision deck is the thing you would have told the class to “make their own flashcards” for. The notes are what you write out by hand for whoever was off sick. The slides are what you rebuild every year because last year’s are on a laptop you gave back.

• Cardscome from the questions directly — the question on the front, its answer on the back. No model call, so no new wording to check.
• Notes and slides are written from what the page covered, not from the questions, so they explain the topic rather than reciting the test.

The compounding bit: a library

The first conversion saves you twenty minutes. The tenth changes how you plan, because you stop making quizzes and start reusing them.

Two habits make that work. Name things so you can find them in November — “G7 fractions: simplify + compare” beats “Quiz 3”. And when a question turns out to be badly worded, fix it in the saved version rather than in the copy you assigned, so the fix survives to next year.

A term of this leaves you with a bank you can assemble from, which is a different and much better position than starting from a photocopy every time.

Keep the paper version

One thing worth saying plainly: moving a paper task online is not an upgrade in every situation. If the internet at your school is unreliable during period 3, paper wins. If you need to see working out in the margin, paper wins. If half the class shares one phone at home, think carefully about the due date.

What the digital version buys you is the marking and the pattern afterwards, and that is worth having for homework even when it is not worth having in class.

Two minutes to convert. Five minutes to check it properly. Then the multiple choice marks itself, and on Tuesday morning you already know who needs it again, instead of finding out on Sunday night with a red pen.