Multiple-choice questions

One or more correct options, marked automatically the moment the candidate submits.

Writing the question

The question body is a rich-text editor with the formatting you would expect: bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, three heading levels, ordered and unordered lists, text colour, superscript and subscript, alignment, tables, images, and fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting.

Use a code block, not inline code, for anything longer than a few tokens. Indentation and line breaks survive in a block and are lost inline, which matters when the question is the snippet.

Options

You start with two empty options and add as many as you need. Each has a toggle marking it correct.

Two rules the editor enforces when you save:

• At least one option must be correct.
• At least one option must be incorrect. A question where everything is correct cannot discriminate between candidates, and under partial credit it awards full marks for selecting everything.

Every option must have text — a blank option is refused rather than silently dropped.

One answer or several

There is no separate single-answer and multi-answer question type. Marking two or more options correct makes it a multi-select question, and candidates can then choose more than one.

This matters because of how it interacts with scoring.

Scoring

Scoring is configured on the assessment, not on the question, and applies to every multiple-choice question in it. Three settings, covered in Creating assessments:

• Partial credit (default) awards marks per correct option selected. All or nothing requires the exact correct set.
• Negative marking (on by default) subtracts marks for wrong selections.
• Penalty per wrong answer — how much each costs. Default 1.0.

If your questions are single-answer, turn negative marking off. It exists to make guessing unprofitable on multi-select questions, where a candidate could otherwise tick everything and collect full partial credit. On single-answer questions it punishes a wrong guess twice — once by missing the mark, once by losing another — and candidates experience that as arbitrary.

Points and time

Points default to 10 and set this question's weight in the assessment total. Time limit defaults to 5 minutes.

A per-question time limit is separate from the assessment's overall duration. Most assessments only need the overall one; per-question limits are worth it when you specifically want to test recall speed rather than reasoning.

Difficulty and tags

Both are for you, not the candidate. Difficulty and tags make a question findable later in the question bank, and tags are what let you assemble a themed assessment quickly. Neither changes scoring or what candidates see.

What candidates see

The question, the options, and nothing else — not which are correct, not how many to pick, and not their score afterwards. Option order is as you wrote it unless the assessment has shuffling enabled, which shuffles the questions rather than the options within them.