Uploading a Question Bank

Question Banks can be saved as either PRIVATE, GLOBAL, SCHOOL or MAT.

Questions must be in an XLSX (Excel) file in order to be able to upload them as a Carousel Question Bank

Two types of Question Bank can be uploaded - free text or multiple choice (templates for both are attached to the bottom of this article.) Free-text Question Banks can only be used to set free-text quizzes. MCQ Question Banks must be uploaded with multiple choice answers but can then be used to set either free-text or multiple-choice quizzes.

Free Text Quiz

If you're an Excel user, you can do this by downloading the Question Bank template attached to the bottom of this page, and then adding in your questions to the file. 

If you're a Google Sheets user, simply create the file in the format described below, and then select File >> Download >> Microsoft Excel to export the file in a format that can be uploaded to Carousel.

The file format should be as follows:

• A single tab
• Four columns on the worksheet with these column headings:
  • Number
  • Question
  • Answer
  • Topic

Here's an example file for a free text quiz Chemistry question bank:

Multiple Choice

If you're an Excel user, you can do this by downloading the Question Bank template attached to the bottom of this page, and then adding in your questions to the file. 

If you're a Google Sheets user, simply create the file in the format described below, and then select File >> Download >> Microsoft Excel to export the file in a format that can be uploaded to Carousel.

The file format should be as follows:

• A single tab
• Columns on the worksheet with these column headings:
  • Number
  • Question
  • Answer
  • Topic
  • Wrong Answer 1
  • Wrong Answer 2
  • Wrong Answer 3
  • Wrong Answer 4

Note: You can have up to 4 wrong answers, but you can choose to have fewer if preferred. 

Here's an example file for a multiple choice History (Roman Britain) question bank:

Tips 

1. Make sure your questions are numbered in sequential order, starting from 1. 
2. Use identical topic names where you want the system to recognise questions within the same topic. The system will create a new topic for every discrete topic name found, so if you have "Number, shape and space" and "Number, shape & space", the system will consider those to be separate topics.
3. When creating a quiz or study pack, topics will be listed in the order that they first appear in the upload spreadsheet.  If you would like the topics to be available to select in a specific order, the first question of each topic should appear in the order you require. Further questions relating to the topic can be added in any order.
4. Only use supported characters. Question banks most commonly get rejected by the system because of the use of unsupported characters – especially when it comes to subscript and superscript. We support most unicode characters, but this does mean a few characters are excluded - particularly in superscript/subscript, and their use will result in the Question Bank getting rejected. When using subscript, superscript and notations in particular (such as in vector equations) we strongly recommend using the Excel "Insert >> Symbol" function. This list shows which superscript/subscripts characters are and are not available as unicode, but as a rule of thumb if it is available as a symbol in Excel then it should be supported.
5. Questions and answers must be a maximum of 700 characters in length. If they are longer, the file will be rejected.
6. Make sure that "Number" is in cell A1 and "Question" is in cell B1 and so on - it won't work if the table is somewhere else on the sheet. 

In the following video, our Education Director Adam Boxer explains how to create and upload a free text quiz Question Bank: