A question pool is a list of questions from which a specified subset of questions are randomly selected for each student's assignment. You can use question pools to give your students several different versions of the same assignment.
When you use question pools, each of your students will receive a different subset of questions from the pool. Depending on the number of questions you include in the pool and the number of questions you select from the pool, some students will have the same questions. For example, if you create a pool that assigns two questions from a list of three questions A, B, and C, only three versions of the pool will be assigned:
- using questions A and B
- using questions B and C
- using questions A and C
You can use multiple question pools in an assignment.
- has the same difficulty
- has the same number of parts
- is the same kind of question (multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, etc.)
- (multiple-choice questions) has the same number of choices
- has roughly the same time estimate as other questions
The time estimate for a question pool is a range that is calculated using the sum of the lowest and highest time estimates for the number of questions you choose to use from the pool. For example, if you choose to use 2 out of 5 questions in a pool, then the lowest time is the total of the 2 shortest question times and the highest time is the total of the 2 longest question times. A good question pool will have a small range because all questions in the pool should have similar time estimates in order to ensure fairness to all students.