Practice questions

For educators

Practice questions come from the course material rather than from scratch, so what students are tested on is what they were taught. There are two ways they arrive: you generate them, or they are extracted from material you upload.

Generating questions

Open the course’s practice tab and choose generate.
Select the documents or topics the questions should come from.
Set complexity (easy, medium, hard, or mixed), type (textual, multiple choice, or maths and formula), and how many questions to produce.
Choose generate.

Where suitable questions already exist for the selected topics, they are reused rather than regenerated. Ignore existing questions forces new ones.

Two shortcuts sit alongside:

Practice a specific file: generate from one document
Create mock exam: a twelve-question mixed set spanning the whole course

Exercises extracted from uploaded material

Material you upload is examined for exercises, and any it contains are turned into practice exercises automatically. You do not ask for this and there is no separate step: it happens as part of processing the upload.

The Exams & exercises option in a folder’s Add menu is the deliberate route. Drop the exam and its solutions in together.

The Upload exams and solutions panel in a course folder, warning that exercises are paired with solutions automatically when document titles are kept similar, above a review list containing Problem Set 1.pdf and Problem Set 1 Solutions.pdf — Library → folder → Add → Exams & exercises.

How exams and solutions are matched

Matching is done on the document titles, at the moment the upload is processed, and only among the files in that same upload. Titles sharing a prefix, with one of them marked as answers, are read as a pair: “Problem Set 1” and “Problem Set 1 Solutions” match, and so do the Dutch and German equivalents (uitwerkingen, antwoorden, oplossingen, lösungen). The contents of the files are not compared when deciding the pairing.

Three consequences follow:

Upload the exam and its solutions in the same upload. Adding the solutions afterwards leaves nothing to pair them with.
Give them similar titles. Two files named “Tentamen 2024” and “Antwoordmodel” share no prefix and will not be recognised as a pair.
A single file holding both the questions and the worked solutions is handled on its own and needs no partner.

Where matching fails, or only the exam was uploaded, the exam is still processed and its questions are still extracted. The answers are simply left empty, and nothing in the interface says why.

What is extracted

From an exam and solutions pair, each numbered exercise becomes one practice exercise carrying:

the exercise title as printed on the paper
the shared introduction or case description above the questions
every sub-part as a separate question, keeping its original label (1a, 1b, 1c)
the question type, and for multiple choice the options and the correct one
the full worked solution for each question, taken from the solutions file
the page it came from, and figures the exercise refers to

The educator Practice exercises list for a Thermodynamics course, showing an extracted exercise named Secants and Tangents with source problem set 1.pdf and 11 questions, listed above six single-question exercises generated from lecture PDFs — An extracted exercise sits in the same list as generated ones.

Difficulty is not extracted. Every extracted question is recorded as mixed complexity regardless of how hard it actually is, which matters if you rely on the complexity filter. Topic linkage is applied where the document’s topics were identified during processing.

Reviewing extracted exercises

Extracted exercises arrive already approved and already visible to students. There is no queue and no gate: from the moment processing finishes, a student opening practice can work through them.

So check the following soon after an exam upload finishes:

Open practice and look at the Source column for the file you uploaded.
Open the exercises and read the grouping. A whole problem set is sometimes gathered into a single exercise rather than one exercise per numbered question.
Confirm the answers are present. Empty answers mean the solutions file was not paired.
Hide or delete anything that should not be in front of students.

When nothing appears

Extraction is quiet when it finds nothing, so an absence of exercises is not reported to you anywhere. Several different situations all look identical from the practice tab:

the material genuinely contains no exercises
the file was judged to be ordinary course material and processed as such, which is what happens to a document whose title suggests an exam but whose contents do not
an exercise was recognised but no questions could be read from it, in which case it is discarded rather than shown empty

If the upload itself failed, that is reported: the document’s card in the library carries a failure message instead of a summary.

Telling extracted apart from generated

The exercises list does not distinguish them. The Source column names a document for both, because a generated question also records the material it was generated from.

The difference shows once an exercise is open. An extracted exercise carries an Imported from banner naming the file, and a View source control that opens the page it came from. A generated exercise has neither.

A practice session showing the exercise Secants and Tangents with an Imported from Problem Set 1.pdf banner above the title, the exercise context, and sub-questions labelled 1a and 1b each with an answer box — The Imported from banner is the reliable signal that an exercise was extracted.

Reviewing and controlling visibility

The exercises view lists everything in the course. For each item you can:

Approve: mark it as checked
Hide from students: keep it out of the student view
Delete: remove it from every course it appears in
Edit: change the title or context

The verified filter narrows the list to approved questions, and a search box filters by title, context, or source document.

The educator Exercises view reading 13 of 13 exercises, with four action cards across the top — Generate new questions, Practice a specific file, Create mock exam and Describe and Practice — above a table of Exercise, Source, Questions and Manage columns. Rows list AI generated exercises such as EFC Process Challenges and RANS Modeling alongside document-sourced ones such as Secants and Tangents from problem set 1.pdf with 11 questions, each row carrying approve, hide-from-students and delete controls, with a Verified filter in the sidebar and a Search exercises box above the table — The exercises view. Extracted and generated questions appear in the same list.

Selecting several questions and choosing practice starts a session with exactly that set, which is the fastest way to check how they read to a student.

Grading rubrics for open-ended questions

Open-ended and mathematical questions can carry a rubric. Choose view rubric on a question to open the builder, where a rubric has a name, a description, a passing threshold, and a list of criteria with points.

A rubric can also be generated from the question and then edited, which is usually faster than writing one from nothing.

Mathematical questions

Mathematical answers are not graded by reading them as prose. Each question can carry ordered rules that check the student’s expression, algebraic equivalence, numeric tolerance, correct units, a valid solution set, and others, each with its own score and feedback.

This is why some mathematical feedback is precise and specific: it comes from a rule you or a colleague authored, not from a general assessment of the answer.

What students experience

Students select questions and work through them, receiving feedback immediately with the sources that explain the answer. During a session they can ask questions without leaving it.

See read and practise for the student view.

Availability

Practice can be switched off per course under settings. Generating, approving, hiding, and deleting require the Educator role.