LearnDash for Beginners: the Quiz Menu

We continue our saga on the basics of LearnDash for those just starting. We’ve already covered how to configure and what options are available in the Course, Lessons, and Topics menus, and today we’ll talk about one of the most important ones: Quiz.

A quiz in LearnDash is nothing more than a questionnaire where you’ll hold several questions of different types for the student to answer and progress through the lessons.

Check out our full LearnDash guide for beginners.

Inside a Quiz

By navigating to the LearnDash > Quiz menu, you can add a new quiz, and you can also add one from inside a course, through the course Builder.

When you add a quiz inside a course’s Builder, it’s automatically linked to that course. If you add it separately, meaning directly from the menu, you’ll need to assign it manually.

When creating a quiz, you’ll find 3 menus: Quiz Page, Settings, and Builder. Let’s explore each one.

Quiz Page

This one is pretty basic. You have the option to add a title and the quiz description, plus the standard WordPress options, like status, featured image, etc.

Naming quiz titles is something worth thinking through, since it depends on your project. I usually name them “Quiz” + Module/Lesson Name. I prefer something short and simple, because it keeps things more organized for the student on the front end.

Once you have a lot of quizzes across more than one course, the quiz menu can get a bit confusing. That’s when you use this menu’s filters to select quizzes by course, lesson, and topic, and you’ll see them all.

Since a quiz covers several questions within a topic, naming it “Quiz + Lesson Name” makes things easier to organize.

Quiz Description

Here you can give the student guidance about this quiz, if needed. You can add images, videos, etc. Anything related to the quiz.

Quiz Settings Tab

Here we’ll see some options we’ve already covered in other menus:

Quiz Release Schedule: here you control when the quiz is released to the student: immediately, a set number of days after enrollment, or on a specific date.

This option tends to be used more at the module level, unless you want certain questions to act as a kind of test released, for example, at the end of the course. That said, if you want to do something like that, I’d recommend creating a module with specific quizzes and releasing it at the end of the course instead. It’s easier to manage.

External Quiz: an option for the student to answer the quiz during a live session, for example, or in person. It can be used for an in-person exam at a school or university, for instance. When you enable this option, you should mention in the quiz description where it will take place, what time, and any other relevant information. You can also choose whether an administrator will manually release the student’s continued progress in the course after this quiz is completed in person or live.

Quiz Prerequisites: simply use this option if you need the student to complete a previous quiz before being allowed to take this one. This works well for non-linear courses, meaning ones where the student can skip content, but you still need them to have the knowledge from earlier lessons before taking this quiz.

Allowed Users: if you check “Only registered users can take this quiz”, it means only logged-in users, or those part of groups, or people who purchased your course, will be able to take this quiz. That doesn’t mean you need to check this option to keep unregistered users from taking the quiz. This option has a more practical use: if you use this quiz outside the course page, through a shortcode, for example, this setting would restrict it to specific registered users on your site.

So, you can leave it unchecked and only enable it if, for some reason, you’re going to take this quiz outside the course and place it elsewhere on your site.

Progression and Restriction Settings

Here, you control the score the student needs in order to move forward with this quiz.

Passing Score: here you set the percentage of correct answers the student needs to reach, for example, 80% of the quiz. If they score below 80%, they’ll need to retake the quiz until they pass, or they could be blocked from advancing through the lessons.

To block the student from continuing through the lessons, you need to configure this properly. First, in the course settings, set progression to linear. This requires the student to go through the lessons and quizzes in sequence, without skipping questions.

In the quiz settings, set the passing score you want (e.g. 80%), and below that, enable “Restrict quiz retakes”. You’ll be able to choose the number of allowed attempts, and whether those attempts apply only to registered users or also to anonymous ones (in case your course is open).

In this scenario, if the student fails all their attempts, they’ll be blocked from continuing the course until released by an administrator. LearnDash displays the following message:

The issue is that LearnDash on its own, without addons, doesn’t offer the option to add a button for the student to contact support. You can build that with code, or do something simpler: in the quiz description, explain that it can only be taken X times, and that if the student doesn’t score at least X%, they should contact support.

Quiz Certificate: here you can attach a certificate upon quiz completion, if the student reaches the required score. It’s an interesting option, though most people prefer to award the certificate at the course completion level instead. It all depends on how your course is set up.

Enable Quiz Saving: enabling this option means that if the student answers part of the questions but leaves the course, when they come back a “Continue Quiz” option will be shown. Highly recommended, since it saves the student from having to start the quiz over from scratch.

Quiz Completion: if this option is enabled, the student can’t finish the quiz while leaving questions blank. Keep in mind that unanswered questions are counted as wrong.

Time Limit: used to add a time limit for completing the quiz. Once added, the student will see a countdown timer as soon as they start answering, and the clock begins running. When it hits zero, LearnDash automatically ends the quiz.

A good option for final exams and corporate training.

Display and Content Options

Quiz Materials: as we’ve seen in other articles, here you can add materials and reference links to this quiz. This will generate a “Materials” tab near the top of the page. Add support materials, downloads, and references there, if needed.

Autostart: enabling this option means that when leaving the previous lesson or quiz and going into the quiz you’re currently editing, no “start” button will appear, it just begins right away. I’d recommend it, since it keeps the course feeling more fluid.

Quiz Display: here you choose whether you want all the quiz questions to appear on screen at once, or one question at a time, with the student clicking “Next” to move forward.

Question Overview Table

When enabled, the student sees a kind of map of the questions.

Example:

They can click the numbers to jump between questions.

This is very useful when you’re using One Question at a Time.

Custom Question Ordering

Here, you can set questions to appear randomly or by category. For example, if you created two question categories, Italian Baroque and German Baroque, the questions can be displayed grouped by those categories.

Additional Question Options

This option simply exposes extra settings inside each question.

Once enabled, you’ll see more options when editing questions, such as:

• Hints
• Custom messages
• Advanced scoring
• Specific feedback

It doesn’t change the quiz’s behavior on its own.

Quiz Title: controls whether the quiz title is shown to the student. Generally, the quiz title already appears at the top of the page, so this can be redundant.

Result Page Display

Result Message(s): here you can configure a message that will appear once the quiz is answered, based on the score. For example, if the score was zero, you could set a final message like: “You haven’t yet shown mastery of LearnDash’s fundamental concepts. We recommend reviewing the lessons and materials before trying again.”

If the score was between 20% and 50%, something like: “You’ll need to study a bit more to get a good grade on this quiz”, and so on.

This works great for a final quiz, with something like:

Restart Quiz Button: an option allowing the student to retake the quiz.

Custom Results Display: here, you can select a few things to show on the results screen, such as the Average Score across all users, or the Average Score per question. Overall Score, already selected by default, shows the student’s own score.

“No. of Correct Answers” shows the number of correct responses, and you can also display how long the student took on the quiz.

Custom Answer Feedback

Lets you show personalized feedback for each answer or question.

Example:

The student answers incorrectly. You can display:

When to use it: very useful for technical courses, software courses, and certification courses.

Correct / Incorrect Messages

Shows messages like “✓ Correct” or “✗ Incorrect” for each answer.

Correct / Incorrect Answer Marks

Visually shows the correct and incorrect answers, usually in green and red.

View Questions Button

Shows a button after the quiz: “View Questions”. When the student clicks it, they can review:

• Questions
• Selected answers
• Correct answers
• Feedback

Administrative and Data Handling Settings

Custom Fields: adds custom fields to the quiz to collect information from the student before or during the assessment. Once enabled, you’ll see two fields appear: Field Name and Type.

Example: asking for “Department”, “Employee ID”, or “Company Name” before starting a corporate training session. Great for corporate or university quizzes, where you can collect student ID, name, phone number, and other data to manage later.

Leaderboard: displays a ranking with the best results obtained in the quiz.

Example: showing the top 10 students by score in a gamified course.

Quiz Statistics: records detailed statistics about answers, correct and incorrect responses, and participant performance. Shows the data only to administrators.

Example: discovering that 80% of students got a question about “Greek History” wrong, and revisiting that lesson. Could the lesson cover that topic better?

Front-end Profile Display: allows quiz statistics and results to be shown on the student’s profile, on the public side of the site.

Example: the student visits their profile and sees they scored 85% on the Final Quiz.

Statistics IP-lock: limits the recording of multiple statistics from the same IP address within a set period.

Example: preventing someone from refreshing the page multiple times and generating duplicate statistical records.

Email Notifications: sends quiz-related email notifications to administrators and/or participants.

Example: the administrator gets an email every time a student completes the final assessment.

Quiz Templates: lets you save and reuse quiz settings as templates.

Example: creating a template with an 80% passing score, 2 attempts, and a 30-minute time limit to use across multiple quizzes. As you’ve probably noticed by now, the Quiz menu has a lot of options, so if you work with highly customized setups, having templates is a great idea.

Advanced Settings: contains advanced configuration options for how the quiz behaves and functions.

Example: adjusting specific display, processing, or compatibility options that don’t appear in the main settings.

Quiz Grid Options

As the name suggests, Quiz Grid options are information blocks you can place throughout your site. For example, if you want to create a page featuring a few specific quizzes, you can use a shortcode like:

This will display a box showing information about that quiz, including:

• Short description: a short description of this quiz.
• Duration: the duration of this quiz.
• Custom button text: the button text you’ll choose for the quiz’s grid box, something like “See more”.
• Custom ribbon text: used to add a banner on the grid to draw attention to it, such as “New Test”, “New Quiz”, “Free Test”, etc.

Builder

This is our third menu inside a quiz’s page. It’s similar to the course page Builder, except it only gives you the option to add quizzes and questions.

In the next article, we’ll dig deeper into questions and their settings. But here we already have some interesting things to cover.

You can select the question type from:

• Single Choice
• Multiple Choice
• Free Choice
• Sorting Choice
• Matrix Sorting Choice
• Fill in the Blank
• Assessment
• Essay/Open Answer

Breaking down each one:

Single Choice

The most common question type. The student sees several alternatives but can only select one answer. Ideal for testing objective knowledge when there’s only one correct answer.

Multiple Choice

Similar to Single Choice, but lets the student select more than one alternative. Useful when a question has multiple correct answers.

The student needs to mark every correct option to receive full credit.

Free Choice

The student types a short answer into a text field. LearnDash compares the typed answer against the correct answers entered by the instructor. Useful for testing specific terms, names, or concepts.

You can register multiple accepted variations, such as: LearnDash, learndash, Learn Dash.

Sorting Choice

The student needs to arrange items in the correct order. Widely used for processes, sequences, and steps.

Matrix Sorting Choice

The student needs to match items from one column with items from another. Works like an association exercise.

The student needs to make the correct matches. Excellent for definitions, concepts, terminology, and translations.

Fill in the Blank

The student fills in blanks within a sentence. Unlike Free Choice, the answer is inserted directly within the context of the question.

The student sees: “The plugin used to create courses in WordPress is ______.”

Another example: “A course can contain Lessons, Topics, and ______.” Answer: Quizzes.

Assessment

A question based on evaluation or scoring, with no right or wrong answer. Each answer is worth a number of points set by the instructor. Widely used for profile tests, self-assessments, diagnostics, and personality questionnaires.

At the end, the result is calculated by adding up the points.

Essay / Open Answer

The student answers freely in a long text box. The answer isn’t automatically graded by LearnDash. It stays pending until an instructor manually grades it.

Student’s answer: “Lessons are the main classes of the course. Topics are used to break a lesson down into smaller parts…”

The administrator then reads the answer, approves or rejects it, and sets the score manually.

This is the ideal type for assignments, essays, case studies, open-ended responses, and more advanced certifications.

Lastly, there’s also the option to award points per quiz completed. We’ll talk more about points further ahead.

Global Quiz Settings

Now, going back to the LearnDash > Quiz > Settings menu, we’ll find a few interesting options we’ve already seen in other articles, but let’s go through them here too.

Quiz Builder: comes automatically selected, and it’s the builder inside the quiz. And yes, I recommend it, since using the builder makes the whole quiz-building process much easier.

Quiz Display: this is the number of questions you want to show before the “Load More” button appears. So, every 10 questions, for example, the Load More button shows up to load the next 10, 15, 20, or however many you choose.

Shared Quiz Questions: enabling this option lets you reuse questions from one quiz across several others.

Custom Quiz Time Formats: a date format setting. Selecting this option opens up several formatting choices. Use whichever fits your country or your users’ country.

Quiz Template Management: remember when we mentioned you could create quiz configuration templates to avoid setting up the same things over and over? Here, in this option, you can see the templates you’ve created, delete them, and update them.

Quiz Email Settings

Admin Notifications: this setting defines the global email template that will be sent to administrators, group leaders, or supervisors when a student completes a quiz.

It works in two steps:

Step 1: Global Configuration

Under LearnDash LMS → Settings → Quizzes → Admin Notifications, you define:

• The email subject
• The message content
• Variables (student name, score, quiz, etc.)
• Who will receive the notification

Example:

Step 2: Enabling It Per Quiz

This part of the description matters: “You must enable ‘Admin Notification’ on a per quiz basis.”

In other words, even after setting up the global template, no email will be sent until you enable the “Admin Notification” option inside each individual quiz.

In the quiz: Settings → Email Notifications → Admin Notification = ON.

Common use cases:

• Corporate training: when a manager needs to know an employee completed an assessment.
• Essay/Open Answer questions: when the instructor needs to manually grade an open-ended answer.
• Certifications: when the team wants to track who passed or failed important assessments.

Difference from User Notifications:

• Admin Notifications → email to the administrator, instructor, or supervisor.
• User Notifications → email to the student themselves.

It’s common to set up both at the same time: the student completes the quiz, the administrator gets notified, and the student gets a confirmation.

User Notifications: basically the same function as above, just focused on the student instead.

Quiz Taxonomies

Here you can choose whether or not to add categories to quizzes.

You’ll notice there are separate category and tag taxonomies for LearnDash and for WordPress. That’s because LearnDash creates its own taxonomies, since quizzes, courses, lessons, and similar elements are Custom Post Types (CPTs) separate from regular WordPress posts.

Currently, for quizzes, these taxonomies come disabled by default, and that’s not by accident. There usually isn’t much need to organize quizzes into categories and tags, since they’re already organized inside a topic, which sits inside a lesson, which sits inside a course. In other words, the structure itself already organizes the quizzes.

It might make some sense when you have many quizzes covering different subjects, like a language school offering English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. In that case, categories help you find and filter quizzes quickly from the dashboard.

Quiz Custom Post Type Options

Quiz Search: allows quizzes to be found through your WordPress site’s search fields. I’d recommend leaving this unchecked, since it doesn’t make much sense for a user to search specifically for a quiz. A lesson or course, maybe, but not a quiz.

Archive Page: since the student reaches the quiz through a course > lesson > topic > quiz flow, it’s not really worth having a public listing of quizzes. This is different from courses, where a visitor can browse the courses on the site, much like students and blog posts. Lessons, topics, quizzes, and assignments make more sense as part of the student’s journey than as standalone content.

And lastly, in the Quiz menu, we have “Submitted Essays”. Here you can see the essays submitted by students for approval or review, as configured within a quiz.

Phew! We’ve reached the end. I hope you’ve learned everything about quizzes, which is the menu with the most information and options in LearnDash’s course structure.

If you need a LearnDash agency to set all of this up for you, get in touch with us!