Create a Quiz in Google Forms: Guide & Tips

With Google Forms you can build not just surveys but complete quizzes with automatic grading, for free and without any extra software. You set the correct answers, assign points, and Google works out each participant's score by itself. Perfect for knowledge tests in class, team training, or a quiz for friends and family. We'll show you step by step how to create a quiz in Google Forms: from quiz mode to the answer key and points all the way to the automatic evaluation, built around one running example, a little general-knowledge quiz.

📌 In short:

• A Google Forms quiz is a normal form with grading. You turn it on under Settings > “Make this a quiz” and then set the correct answer and points for each question via the answer key.
• Automatic grading works with all the common question types: multiple choice, checkboxes, dropdown, and short answer.
• Under “Release grades” you decide whether participants see their result right away or only after a manual review.

New to Google Forms? This tutorial focuses entirely on the quiz feature and assumes you already know how to build a basic form.

Turn on quiz mode in Google Forms

At its core, a Google Forms quiz is a normal form where you additionally store correct answers and points. To make that possible, you first have to switch on quiz mode. After that, every question gets the option to define a solution.

How to turn on quiz mode:
Open a form, go to “Settings” at the top, and switch on the “Make this a quiz” option. From now on your form is a quiz.

As long as you leave this option off, the form stays a normal survey without grading. You can switch quiz mode off again later, and any answers you've already stored will be kept.

💡 Good to know:

Whether it's a quiz or a survey, the questions are built the same way. Which question types you can use, and when each one fits, is covered in our overview.

Add questions and set the correct answers

Now you build your quiz questions. This works just like a normal questionnaire, with one difference: for each question, you use the answer key to define which answer is correct and how many points it's worth.

Step 1: Create a question

Add a question as usual and pick the right question type. For our general-knowledge quiz, for example:

• “How many countries make up the UK?” (multiple choice)
• “Which of these cities are in Europe?” (checkboxes, several correct)
• “What is the capital of Australia?” (short answer)

Which question type makes sense in each case decides how good your evaluation will be. You'll find an overview in our post on question types and answers in questionnaires.

Step 2: Set the answer key

On the question, click “Answer key”. There you mark the correct answer (several with checkboxes) and enter the number of points it earns.

This works with all the usual question types: multiple choice, checkboxes, dropdown, and short answer. For short answers, you store one or more accepted spellings as the correct solution.

💡 Practical tip:

Keep the accepted answers to short-answer questions simple. Otherwise Google counts typos or different spellings as wrong. For tricky terms, a multiple-choice question is often fairer.

Add feedback and explanations

A good quiz doesn't just tell people whether an answer was right, but also why. In Google Forms you can store feedback for each question (again via the answer key) that participants see after submitting, separately for correct and incorrect answers.

For the question about Australia's capital, for example, you could add: “The correct answer is Canberra, not Sydney, which is only the largest city.” Especially with learning and knowledge quizzes, that's the difference between merely being tested and actually learning something.

Add a description to a question

If you want to put a hint or some context in front of a question, use the three dots at the bottom right of the question to show the “Description” option. A short explanation or a source reference fits nicely there.

Release grades: when participants see their result

You decide when and how your participants find out their result. You'll find this setting under Settings > Release grades. There are two options:

• Immediately after submission: Participants see their result right after sending. Ideal for casual knowledge quizzes with quick feedback.
• Later, after manual review: You release the results only after checking them yourself. Useful when there are open-ended answers that you mark by hand.

Important: For the “later, after manual review” option, you need to know who submitted which quiz. To do that, turn on “Collect email addresses” under Settings > Responses so you can match the results to the right people.

Note: As soon as you collect email addresses, the quiz is no longer anonymous. We explain what that means for data protection below, and in detail in our post on the anonymous survey.

Share your quiz and review the results

Once your quiz is ready, you share it just like a normal survey: through the “Publish” button and the link you hand out by message, email, or QR code.

The quiz evaluation

In the “Responses” tab, a quiz gives you extra evaluations that a normal survey doesn't have. Among other things, Google shows you:

• the points distribution across all participants,
• questions that were frequently answered incorrectly,
• the average grade across all submissions.

This is especially valuable for learning: the “frequently answered incorrectly” overview shows you at once where knowledge gaps remain. For a deeper analysis, link the results to Google Sheets or download them as a CSV.

Data protection and the limits of quizzes

The same data-protection rules apply to quizzes as to surveys, with one special case: as soon as you assign results to individual people (for manual grade release, say), you collect email addresses and therefore personal data.

If you use the quiz for business, in a club, or at school, you should keep the same points in mind as with any online survey: a data processing agreement with Google, an adjusted privacy policy, and, where applicable, cookie consent. You'll find the details in our guide to data protection and GDPR for surveys.

Where Google Forms quizzes reach their limits

For most knowledge tests, Google Forms is more than enough. You reach its limits when you need more:

• No real time limit per question: Google Forms doesn't offer a built-in timer that jumps ahead after X seconds.
• Limited cheating protection: switching to other tabs or looking things up can't be prevented.
• Plain design: for elaborately designed or playful quizzes, the options are limited.

If you hit these limits, it's worth looking at specialised tools. A modern, free option is empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany with GDPR-compliant EU data hosting. Which one suits what, we compare in our overview of the best survey tools. And if you'd rather start with ready-made questions, our survey templates and samples will help.

Conclusion: quizzes with Google Forms are built fast

A quiz with Google Forms is ready to go in a few minutes: turn on quiz mode, set the answer key with the correct answer and points for each question, optionally add feedback, and use “Release grades” to control when participants see their result. The automatic evaluation takes all the counting off your hands and even shows you which questions were answered incorrectly most often.

For knowledge tests in class, small training sessions, or a quiz among friends, that's more than enough. Only when you need time limits, real cheating protection, or an elaborate design does a specialised tool become worthwhile.