3 Paths in 1 Quiz: Possible? Yes!

An Articulate user asked us a great question recently. She wanted to build an Articulate Quizmaker ‘09 quiz consisting of three paths, with each path containing a different group of scenario-related questions. Rather than make all of her learners complete all the questions, she wanted to let each learner choose just one of the paths at the beginning of the quiz.

Is it possible? Definitely! All it takes is some simple branching techniques in Quizmaker, and an unscored survey question at the beginning. Here’s how you can do it:

First: create your questions and organize them into groups

Although it’s not mandatory, separating your questions into groups makes it much easier to visually organize them when you're creating your content. By default, whenever you start a new quiz it contains a single question group, and all your questions end up there. But you can easily add more groups and reorganize your questions to be in whichever groups you want.

Start by clicking the Question Group button:

Quizmaker adds a new group header to your question list. Double-click the group name if you want to change it to something more intuitive. You’re the only one who will see the name—it won’t appear to learners—so you can call it anything you like. 

Now create your questions, and drag each one into the appropriate group. You can also rearrange the order of the question groups themselves if you want—just click and drag the group header to a different place in the question list, and any questions in that group will travel together.

In the example below, I’ve created three question groups and placed two questions in each group:

Second: insert an unscored question at the beginning so learners can choose their path

Once your questions are arranged into groups, you can create one more question group at the beginning to contain a single “gateway” question. This is just an unscored question that lets learners choose which question group they’ll complete. You can use a survey question in Quizmaker—since survey questions don't have a point value, the question won’t impact the learner’s score. Here’s what to do:

Third: apply branching

Finally, you’ll need to add some branching. There are a couple places you’ll want to do this:

• On the survey question at the beginning, you’ll add branching on each of the three choices, so that learners jump to the right questions, based on their choice.
• After the final question in both the 1st and 2nd question groups, you’ll add branching that takes the learner to the end of the quiz. (You don’t have to do this for the final question group, since that one’s already at the end of the quiz.)

Here’s a quick look at how to set up the branching:

That’s all there is to it! If you choose to include a result slide at the end, the score that appears there is based on only the questions the learner answered (not the entire lot of questions in the quiz). So in my example below, even though my quiz actually contains six graded questions worth 10 points apiece, the learner’s score is based on just the two questions (20 points) that comprise the question group they complete. And if you include a Review Quiz button on your result slide, during the quiz review your learners will only see the questions they answered (not the questions that were part of the other question groups).

Below is a sample of the published quiz, and you can also download the source file if you’d like to deconstruct.

View the published sample | Download the quiz