A step-by-step guide to a Moodle Quiz that resists copying: question bank by category, random questions, time limit, one attempt, sequential navigation, review options, password and network address. What Safe Exam Browser locks and what it cannot see. And what Moodle does not do: proctoring, copy-paste detection, identity checks, AI-assisted grading.
An exam in Moodle is built with the Quiz activity. With its default settings, it is a practice quiz: the same questions in the same order for everyone, no time limit, the right answer shown as soon as the attempt is submitted. Turning it into a secure exam needs no plugin. It needs eight settings, in a precise order, and knowing where Moodle stops.
This guide walks through those settings one by one, under the names they carry on the settings screen. It then covers what Safe Exam Browser adds, what it cannot see, and what Moodle does not do even with it. It ends with two honest paths for when that is not enough.
The security of a Moodle quiz is decided before the quiz exists, in the course’s question bank. A quiz that draws from a small, flat bank is a quiz that gets copied in one screenshot.
The useful unit is the category. Create one category per topic or per learning objective and, inside each, several questions of comparable difficulty. That is what will let Moodle, at the next step, draw a different question for each participant without making the exam easier for some than for others. A category of three questions gives three versions of the exam; a category of twelve gives twelve.
If your questions already exist in Word, in Excel or in a text file, do not retype them into Moodle’s form. Import them into the bank in one of the formats it accepts; the end of this guide covers that.
The names below are those of the English language pack. They change shape from one version to the next, not place.
On the quiz editing page, the Add button offers a random question. Pick the category and the number of questions to draw from it. At every attempt, Moodle will draw that number of questions from the category. Repeat for each category in the bank: five categories with two random questions each give a ten-question exam in which two neighbours in the room do not see the same questions.
On the same page, the Shuffle checkbox changes the order of the questions from one attempt to the next. It is the second level of randomisation, and the cheapest: it costs no extra question.
Under Question behaviour, Shuffle within questions shuffles the choices of every multiple-choice question. Question 3 stays question 3, but the right answer is no longer B for everyone. Each question also has its own Shuffle the choices setting, which must stay on for the quiz-level setting to take effect. Watch out for choices such as All of the above: they get shuffled too, and stop making sense.
In the same section, leave the behaviour on Deferred feedback. The interactive modes with several tries per question are designed for practice, not for an exam.
Under Timing, Open the quiz and Close the quiz set the period during which an attempt can be started and finished. For an exam in a room, tighten the window to the actual time of the exam, with a few minutes of margin. A one-week window for a one-hour exam is an invitation to compare answers across groups.
Time limit sets the duration of an attempt from the moment the participant starts it. When time expires decides what happens to an attempt that was not submitted: the safest option is that open attempts are submitted automatically. Keep in mind that the time limit and the close time stack: a participant who starts ten minutes before the close has ten minutes, not the full duration.
For a participant entitled to extra time, the quiz’s User overrides let you grant a different time limit without changing the rule for everyone else.
Under Grade, Attempts allowed defaults to Unlimited. Set it to 1. A second attempt is for learning; in an exam, it is for coming back with the answers from the first one.
Under Layout, New page controls how many questions appear per page. One question per page limits what fits in a screenshot. Navigation method, visible after Show more, defaults to Free; set to Sequential, the participant cannot go back to a previous page. It is a demanding setting: use it when the order of the questions matters, and announce it before the exam.
This is the section that exposes the most Moodle exams. The Review options table has four columns: during the attempt, immediately after the attempt, later while the quiz is still open, and after the quiz is closed. With the defaults, a participant who finishes first sees the right answer while the others are still answering.
Untick everything in the first three columns, in particular Whether correct and Right answer, and leave in the last column whatever you want to show. Participants will see their marked attempt once the quiz is closed for everyone.
Under Extra restrictions on attempts, Require password asks for a key before an attempt can start. Say it out loud at the start of the exam, not by email the day before. Require network address limits attempts to a list of IP addresses or subnets: in an exam room, the room’s. Outside a room, this setting is useless, because the address of a participant at home is not predictable.
In the same section, Browser security offers a full screen pop-up with some JavaScript security. As the name says, it is some security: it closes the right click and a few shortcuts, and a participant who knows how to open another window opens it anyway.
Safe Exam Browser, or SEB, is a free application maintained by ETH Zurich. It replaces the browser during the exam and puts the computer into kiosk mode: full screen with no address bar, no application switching, no keyboard shortcuts, no screenshots, and only the URLs the configuration allows.
Moodle has shipped with it since version 3.9. In the quiz’s Safe Exam Browser section, Require the use of Safe Exam Browser accepts several modes: configure manually from Moodle, upload your own configuration file, or use the SEB client configuration. In manual mode, Moodle generates the file, and the checkboxes that follow decide whether the participant sees a quit button, can switch to another application, can reload the page. Moodle then checks, through keys computed from the configuration, that the browser connecting is SEB with that configuration and not an ordinary browser.
It is a real barrier against other tabs and other applications. It is worth knowing what it is not. SEB locks the computer, not the room. It does not see a phone on a lap, a second computer next to it, paper notes, or the person dictating the answers. A second monitor is only blocked if the SEB configuration expressly forbids it, and Moodle does not detect it on its own. It records nothing either: if there is a doubt after the exam, there is nothing to review.
It also costs an installation on every machine, with administrator rights, and part of the technical support shifts to the institution. In a room, on machines the institution controls, it works well. Remotely, on each participant’s personal computer, the installation fails on a share of the machines, and not always the day before.
A short list, because it is the one guides usually leave out. Out of the box, without a third-party plugin, Moodle:
For a formative assessment or an exam in a supervised room, those limits are not a problem: the room and the teacher do what Moodle does not. For a remote exam whose grade counts, they are.
Evalmee connects to Moodle over LTI 1.3. It is added as an External tool activity inside the course: the teacher creates the exam from Moodle, syncs the course’s students to Evalmee, and the grades come back into Moodle once marking is done. The three steps, creation, sync and grade return, are documented for Moodle, Canvas and Blackboard on the integrations page.
What changes compared with the native quiz lies in the exam itself. During the exam, Evalmee detects screen exits, copy-paste and the presence of a second screen, and assigns a fraud risk score that the examiner reads in an integrity report. The webcam and the microphone are options the institution turns on, visible to the participant. Identity is checked with a photo of the ID document and of the face, compared by a person, not by an algorithm. The risk score closes no exam and decides nothing in your place. The details are on the monitoring page. At marking time, closed questions grade themselves and, on written answers, an AI assistant suggests points and feedback that the grader reviews and approves.
Three limits to know before planning a term. The sync takes every student in the course: assigning a single Moodle group is not possible yet. The other teachers of the course do not automatically become collaborators on the exam. And the schedule set in Evalmee is the one that applies, not the Moodle quiz’s. The LMS integration belongs to the Organization plan, on quote: it is not open in the Mini, Pro and Max plans on the pricing page. A teacher subscribing alone will not get the activity in their course.
If your exam takes place in a room, on machines your institution controls, and your questions are multiple choice, the Moodle quiz configured as above does the job, and you need nothing else.
The other path does not replace Moodle: it feeds it. Moodle imports questions into the bank in several text formats, and three cover almost everything. Aiken is the simplest: one question per block, choices from A to Z, an ANSWER line with the right letter. It can only express a single-answer question. GIFT is Moodle’s native format: several correct answers with their weight, feedback per choice, true/false, short answer and numerical. Moodle XML covers everything else.
Evalmee’s Moodle converter produces all three from a Word document, an Excel workbook or pasted text. It recognises numbered questions, choices marked with a letter or a bullet, and the right answer flagged with an asterisk, in bold or in the last column of a table. It also validates an existing file and points to the line that fails, with the reason, which is exactly what Moodle does not say when it rejects an import. Everything converts in the browser, with no sign-up and nothing sent to a server.
The same bank can travel the other way. A bank exported from Moodle as XML imports into Evalmee as an exam or as a bank to draw questions from, with one rule to know: only questions of type multiplechoice and essay are picked up, and one bank is created for each lowest category in the Moodle hierarchy.
Not out of the box. The Quiz activity does not turn on the webcam or the microphone, does not detect copy-paste or a second screen, and does not verify who is answering beyond their login. Third-party plugins exist; the institution installs and maintains them itself.
It stops cheating from the locked computer: other applications, other tabs, keyboard shortcuts and screenshots are closed off. It sees nothing outside that computer: a phone, a second computer, paper notes or a person sitting next to the candidate stay invisible.
Random questions drawn from question bank categories, shuffled choices, a tight open and close window, a time limit, one attempt, sequential navigation, review options switched off until the quiz closes, an access password and, in an exam room, a network address restriction.
Yes, over LTI 1.3. Evalmee is added as an External tool activity in the course: the teacher creates the exam from Moodle, syncs the course’s students and gets the grades back in Moodle after marking. The integration belongs to the Organization plan, on quote.
By converting them into a format Moodle imports: Aiken for single-answer questions, GIFT for several correct answers or per-choice feedback, Moodle XML for everything else. Evalmee’s free converter produces all three from Word, Excel or plain text, in the browser, and points to the line that makes an existing file fail.
Discover how Evalmee can simplify your assessment process.
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