Kahoot alternatives for real assessment, not just games
Five alternatives presented honestly, then the cases where Evalmee is the right choice and those where it is not.
Kahoot livens up a live class; it is not built to grade an exam with a grading scheme, open questions and proctoring. This page compares the tools that are.
What Kahoot does well
Kahoot is a live quiz game: the teacher projects the question, participants answer from their phone with a game PIN, and a podium rewards the fastest. To wake up a lecture hall or check in five minutes what has been retained, it works.
What it does well follows from what it is: a tool for engagement. Points depend on speed as much as on accuracy, the leaderboard appears between two questions, and nobody needs an account to play. That is what makes a Kahoot quiz feel alive, and it is also what makes it unfit for summative assessmentSummative assessmentAn assessment that comes at the end of a sequence, a module or a year to take stock of what has been learned and produce a grade that counts. It fixes a result rather than accompanying progress, and differs from formative assessment in its function, not in the format of the questions asked. The word comes from sum: the grade summarizes what has been learned, and it serves to decide, to pass a module, to rank, to admit, to award a title. When that decision conditions a degree or a certification, the more precise term is certification assessment. Example: the final exam of a contract law course, two hours, one case study and ten short questions, graded out of 100 and weighing sixty percent of the module grade, the rest coming from continuous assessment. Because its grade has consequences, a summative assessment demands more than a formative one: a grading scheme published in advance, identical sitting conditions for everyone, identification of the candidate, a traceable grading process and a route for appeals. An item analysis after the exam remains useful: a question that the strongest candidates miss more often than the others points to an ambiguous wording or a wrong answer key.: a grade that counts should not depend on reaction time, nor on a phone lying on the desk.
If your need is to engage a room, Kahoot or one of the five alternatives below will do. If your need is to grade, the rest of this page is for you.
What a quiz game does not do
- Apply an explicit grading scheme, with a penalty for a wrong answer and a floor
- Have a written answer graded by a person
- Watch the exam: screen exits, copy-paste, second screen
- Produce a graded script per participant, archivable as a PDF
- Return a grade per criterion alongside the overall grade
Five Kahoot alternatives, depending on what you are looking for
Four of these tools do the same job as Kahoot, engagement, with differences that matter. The fifth, Evalmee, does a different job: graded assessment. Each card says who the tool is for, whether it has a free plan, and what it does not do.
Wooclap
For higher education and professional training: polls, word clouds, multiple-choice and open questions, projected live during a class. Belgian vendor; its documentation states that data is hosted in the European Union. Free plan according to the vendor. Limitation: built for interaction during a session, not for a graded exam with proctoring.
Quizizz (now Wayground)
Mostly for secondary schools: quizzes each participant plays at their own pace, with a leaderboard, memes and a homework mode. US vendor; free plan for teachers according to the vendor. Limitation: the mechanic is still the game; no discipline-specific grading scheme, no proctoring, no human grading of written answers.
Socrative
For end-of-class quizzes and exit tickets: multiple-choice, true/false and short-answer questions, immediate results, a team race mode. Free plan according to the vendor, alongside a paid version. Limitation: three question formats and no proctoring at all; designed to check understanding, not to run an exam.
Genially
For interactive materials: presentations, escape games, gamified quizzes embedded in a document. Spanish vendor; free plan according to the vendor. Limitation: Genially is a content creation tool, not a grading tool; tracking individual answers is not what it is for.
Mentimeter
For live questions during a lecture or a workshop, with a quiz competition mode and a leaderboard. Swedish vendor; free plan limited in questions per presentation according to the vendor. Limitation: it is an audience interaction tool; no grading scheme, no written answers graded by a person, no proctoring.
Kahoot or Evalmee: the table
Seven rows, the ones a head of teaching looks at before grading an exam with a tool. Kahoot is not caught out here: it never claimed to do what the right-hand column describes.
| Criterion | Kahoot | Evalmee |
|---|---|---|
| Grading with a scoring scheme | Points per question, speed bonus; no penalty and no floor | Reward, penalty, calculation base and floor; discordance scoring for health-school competitive exams |
| Open questions graded | Short typed answer, matched against a list of accepted answers | Six open types graded by a person, with the Evalmee IA assistant on written answers |
| Anti-cheating | No proctoring of any kind | Full screen, screen exits and copy-paste detected; second screen from the Pro plan up; webcams and microphone on the Organization plan; the examiner decides |
| Exporting results | Downloadable game report as a spreadsheet | Results in Excel, graded scripts in PDF, REST API |
| Grade per criterion | No | Yes, in criterion-referenced mode, alongside the overall grade |
| Hosting in France and GDPR | Norwegian vendor; hosting per the vendor's terms | France, with Scaleway and AWS France; Evalmee is the processor, the institution the controller |
| Price | Free basic version, paid plans per the vendor | 14 days free with no credit card, then see the pricing page |
When Evalmee is the right choice, and when it is not
Evalmee is the right choice when the grade counts. It is not the right choice when the goal is to make a lecture hall look up.
Graded continuous assessmentContinuous assessmentA mode of assessment that spreads grading across several exercises over time rather than concentrating it in a single final exam. It smooths the effect of one poor performance and gives regular measurement points, at the cost of a heavier organizational and grading load. is the first case: a weekly MCQ whose points go into the average needs a grading schemeGrading schemeThe rule that converts a candidate's answers into a grade. It sets the number of points per question, any penalties, and the way partial credit is awarded. Published before the exam, it constitutes the examiner's commitment as to what will be rewarded. fixed before the exam, a different paper for each participant, and a script that can be challenged. The exam is the second: a midterm, a certification, a competitive exam, with proctoringRemote proctoringThe set of arrangements that make it possible to supervise a candidate sitting outside an exam center: video and audio capture, screen sharing, detection of atypical behavior. The level chosen must stay proportionate to the stakes of the exam and to the data it leads you to collect. set to match the stakes, remote or in a room. The placement testPlacement testA test taken at the start of a course or training program to locate each participant against the objectives of the pathway: what they already master, what they lack, and therefore where to begin. It is the form diagnostic assessment takes in vocational training. A placement test differs from a level test, which ranks a person on a general scale, A2 or B1 in a language for instance, with no reference to a particular course; placement measures the gap between what a participant brings on entry and the content of a given program. Its result is not a grade that counts: it serves to adapt the duration, the pace or the modules, to exempt participants from what is already acquired, and as a baseline for measuring progress at the end of the course. Example: before a thirty-hour spreadsheet course, a fifteen-question test spread over formulas, references, sorting and charts; a participant who passes the first two blocks skips the first day. Quality frameworks for training providers generally ask that needs and prior achievements be identified on entry to the program; the test, its grid and the report handed to the participant are the usual evidence. In the UK and the US, colleges use placement tests to assign students to the right level of a course, most often in mathematics, writing and languages. at the start of a course is the third: a grade per criterion says where each learner stands, and the export serves as evidence. The grading scheme, random draw and proctoring settings are gathered on the online MCQ page; proctoring alone is detailed on the exam proctoring page.
Evalmee is not the right choice for a warm-up quiz in a lecture hall: there is no game PIN, no podium, no live leaderboard, and participants each sit at their own machine. Nor is it the right choice for a team game or an ungraded end-of-class ritual. For those uses, Kahoot and the four engagement tools above do better.
Evalmee is the right choice for
- Graded continuous assessment, with a grading scheme fixed before the exam
- An exam, a midterm or a certification, proctored or not
- A placement test with a grade per criterion and an export
How do you move from a Kahoot quiz to a graded exam?
Evalmee does not import a Kahoot file. The AI-assisted import, however, reads a Word, PDF or Excel document and offers its questions one by one, and an Excel template accepts a full paper with its points.
The work is therefore to get your questions out of Kahoot into a document, then to import them. Once inside Evalmee, the paper is structured into sections and exercises, the grading scheme is set on the multiple-choice questions, and the random draw pulls from a bank the number of questions you decide. The four import paths are detailed on the create an exam page; the plans, on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Not for livening up a live class: Evalmee has no game PIN, no podium and no live leaderboard. Evalmee is for assessing: a grading scheme with penalty and floor, open questions graded by a person, proctoring of the exam, and exports of results in Excel and of papers in PDF.
No, Evalmee does not import a Kahoot file. The AI-assisted import, however, reads a Word, PDF or Excel document and offers its questions one by one, an Excel template accepts a full paper with its points, and a Moodle XML export is taken as it is. So you copy your questions into a document before importing them.
Evalmee gives you 14 days free, with no credit card, on your first exam. Beyond that, the plans are set out on the pricing page, which is the only up-to-date source on this.
The exam runs in a standard browser, and the recommended setup is a laptop or desktop computer. If event-triggered screenshots (Pro, Max and Organization plans) or screen video (Organization plan) are switched on, the exam becomes accessible from a computer only, neither tablet nor phone; that restriction can be lifted participant by participant.
Yes. A session carries its own opening and closing times, becomes visible fifteen minutes beforehand, and participants each sit at their own machine, in a room or remotely. There is no projection of the questions and no live leaderboard: results are published after grading, by mail merge.