Inspera Assessment (IA) provides user friendly interfaces to create questions directly in the platform. However, if you already have a big question bank outside of IA, which are in formats inconvenient to copy and paste into IA, or which can be converted at scale into a structured format, it may be easier and more effective to have these questions imported via Excel.
For this purpose, Inspera provides a free service that will create questions in the IMS QTI 2.1 format based on an excel file, which can then be imported directly in Inspera Assessment.
The following question types are supported to import to Inspera Assessment from Excel:
Table of content
How to create questions in Excel
1. Create an Excel file, or a Google Sheet.
2. Name the tab "questions".
3. Start with the first row in your sheet. The bold text listed below should be the header of each column in your excel file, making the first row:
A) QuestionType: The question type. Currently supported:
- multiple_choice - for multiple choice questions with a single correct answer
- multiple_response - for multiple response questions (i.e. multiple choice with potentially more than a single correct answer)
- essay - for questions with a long form answer, typically presented with a rich text editor for the user.
B) QuestionName - The question name, used for finding the question for administrative purposes.
C) QuestionText - The question text, visible for candidates. Can contain HTML and even LaTeX if you are advanced, see the examples further down in this article.
While you could potentially add images as base64-encoded versions, the recommended approach for illustrations and other attachments is to use the Inspera Assessment authoring UI for these.
D) Randomize - Use a checkmark "x", "X" or the value 1 to indicate randomization is wanted for this question. Leave empty if you do not wish randomization.
If randomization is enabled on a question, it means that the order of the options/alternatives will be different for each candidate who gets this question on a test.
For question types not supporting randomization of options, like essay, this column is ignored.
E) OptionText - The text for the alternative in the question types Multiple Choice and Multiple Response. Same formatting rules as for QuestionText. You can enter up to 8 options/alternatives, each option with its own column. See example below.
F) IsCorrect - Use a checkmark "x", "X" or the value 1 to indicate this is the correct answer. Leave empty or use the value 0 to indicate wrong answer.
Applies to the OptionText in the cell to the left.
4. Once you have filled in the sheet with all the questions, save it as an .xlsx file. Then you may import them to Inspera Assessment. When you are importing the .xlsx file to Inspera Assessment you may have to choose "All files" to find the .xlsx file. This depends on what kind of computer or browser you use.
Read Import questions and questions sets (QTI) to get more information on how to import. Behind the scenes, the .xlsx file is converted to a zip-file in the IMS QTI 2.1 format, which is then imported into Inspera Assessment.
Formatting and LaTeX
Formatting can be done by including basic HTML formatting tags like <b> in the Excel cell content.
- Bold formatted: <b>text</b>
- Italic formatted: <i>text</i>
- Underlined text: <u>text</u>
You can also leave the text plain in the import and format after importing in the editor in Inspera Assessment.
If you want to include LaTeX you write the mathematical expression inside of a parentesis like such:
\( expression \)
LaTeX examples:
- \( \sqrt{4x^2} \) will result in
- \((2x\sin (xyz)+x^2yz\cos (xyz))\mathbf {i}+x^3z\cos (xyz)\mathbf {j}+x^3y\cos (xyz)\mathbf {k}\) will result in
Marks
By default the different question types have the following mark settings:
Multiple choice: 1 mark for correct and 0 marks for wrong answer.
Multiple response: 1 mark for correct and 0 marks for wrong answer.
Essay: maximum 10 marks.
If you want to change the scoring options this has to be edited in Inspera Assessment after import.
Examples
We will provide you with some examples of how your excel file should look like.
Example 1: All three question types
This is an example of an import of 3 different types of questions:
- Essay
- Multiple response - 4 alternatives, where 2 of these are correct answers (marked with value 1 in the cell to the right of the correct option). The wrong answers are marked with value 0 in cell to the right of the option.
- Multiple choice - 3 alternatives, where 1 of these is the correct answer (marked with value 1 in the cell to the right of the correct option). The wrong answers are marked so by leaving the cell to the right of the option empty.
Your Excel file should have the following rows and columns:
Example 2: Essay questions
This is an example of an import of 2 essay questions.
Your Excel file should have the following rows and columns:
Example 3: Multiple Response questions
This is an example of an import of four multiple response questions.
Your Excel file should have the following rows and columns:
- The tab has to be named "questions" (the other tabs which are not named "questions" are ignored).
- You can name the xlsx file to whatever you want. When imported to Inspera, the generated question set will get the name "excel2qti" regardless of the name of the file.
- Remember to check and set the correct number of marks on each question.