What you’ll be able to do

Right, so here’s the thing. You’ve got notes, or a textbook chapter, or some lesson plan you wrote at 11pm last term, and you need a quiz out of it. Questions, options, an answer key, marks per question, the lot. By the end of this you’ll be able to feed that material to an AI assistant, get back a proper quiz, check it isn’t lying to you, and drop it into something people can actually take. Google Forms, Kahoot, Microsoft Forms, whatever you use.

That’s it. Not trivia night. An actual working quiz with a key that matches the source.

Before you start

The single most important thing here, and I mean the thing that decides whether this whole exercise works or not, is this: give the AI your source material. The notes. The chapter. The lesson plan. Paste it in or upload it, and tell the assistant to write questions only from that.

If you skip this step, it’ll write questions from memory. Generic ones. And that’s exactly where you get errors, off-syllabus content, and questions about stuff you never actually taught. It’s not malicious, the assistant is just filling gaps with whatever’s statistically likely rather than what’s actually in your material.

Second thing: check the answer key. Every time. The assistant will occasionally mark its own wrong answer as correct, and a quiz with a broken key does more damage than no quiz at all, because people trust it.

Third: privacy. Don’t upload pupil names, marks, or any personal data alongside your notes. Just the content. And if you’re a teacher, check your school’s policy on AI-made materials before you run anything in class, some schools have rules, some don’t, but it’s worth thirty seconds to check. Textbook chapters are also copyrighted, so this is for your own class quiz, not for publishing online or handing around.

Get set up

You don’t need anything fancy for this. Any of the mainstream assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will write the questions on a free plan, and a separate free tool runs the quiz. Here’s roughly how the main ones work.

Google Forms is free with a Google Account and probably the easiest starting point. Open a form, go to Settings, turn on “Make this a quiz,” then set your answer key and points per question. It marks multiple choice automatically, which saves you a job.

Microsoft Forms works similarly, sign in at forms.office.com, choose New Quiz, mark the correct answer with the tick, add points. Some accounts have a Copilot box at the start that can generate a draft quiz from a description, but honestly, I’d still write the real questions with your assistant first and paste them in, more control that way.

Kahoot! (kahoot.com) is the one for a live class game, everyone on their phones, points for speed, that sort of thing. The free Kahoot! Go plan covers basic quiz and true/false questions with a cap on players. Its own AI question generation sits behind the paid plans, so the move here is to generate your questions elsewhere with your assistant, then paste them in.

And Quizlet, worth a mention, turns the same question list into study sets and practice tests, useful if revision rather than a live game is the goal.

None of these need you to pay for anything extra to use what I’m describing here. The AI does the writing, the tool does the running.

Try it yourself

Right, three prompts. Each does a different job, and honestly the order matters, build, reformat, check.

First one builds the quiz from your material:

Using only the notes below, write a 10-question quiz for [level, e.g. Year 9 / A-level / new starters]. Six multiple choice with four options where each wrong option is a mistake a real learner makes, three short answer with a model answer and marks per point, one explain-why question. Order easy to hard. Put the answer key in a separate block at the end and quote the line of the notes each answer comes from. Notes: [paste]

That bit about “each wrong option is a mistake a real learner makes” is doing a lot of work. It’s the difference between a distractor that actually catches someone (a sign error, a mixed-up unit, a common confusion) and one that’s so obviously wrong nobody picks it.

Second prompt reformats whatever you’ve got into something you can paste straight into Forms or Kahoot:

Rewrite these questions as a plain numbered list: question, then options A to D on one line each, then "Answer: [letter]", so I can paste them into Google Forms. [paste]

You can ask for CSV instead if your tool prefers that, either works, depends what you’re pasting into.

Third one, and don’t skip this, checks the key before anyone sees the quiz:

Check this answer key against the notes. For each answer, say correct or incorrect and quote the line that proves it. Notes: [paste]. Key: [paste]

Run that even if you’re fairly sure the key’s right. Especially then, actually, because that’s when you’re least likely to catch a mistake yourself.

Check the result

Before this goes anywhere near a class or a revision session, run these five checks. They take about ten minutes total.

Take the quiz yourself, cold, no answer key in front of you. If you can’t get full marks on your own material, something’s off, either the questions are ambiguous or they’re testing something you never covered.

Give it to one other person before the class does it. A colleague, a friend, your own kid if that’s who it’s for. Fresh eyes catch things you’ve gone blind to.

Look for two questions asking the same thing in different words. Happens more than you’d think, especially when the assistant’s working from a chapter with a few repeated ideas.

Make sure no question can be answered without actually reading the material. If someone could guess it from general knowledge, it’s not testing what you taught, it’s testing what they already knew walking in.

And check the key against the source, line by line. Not skim it, actually check it. This is the one step people skip because it feels tedious, and it’s the one that matters most.

If it doesn’t work

A few things go wrong reliably, and each has a fix.

Questions feel like trivia instead of testing understanding. This happens when you don’t ask for anything beyond recall. Fix it by explicitly asking for “why” and “what would happen if” questions, they force actual thinking rather than fact-matching.

Wrong options are obviously wrong, nobody’s fooled, the multiple choice isn’t doing its job. Ask for distractors based on named misconceptions rather than just “wrong answers.” Tell it the kind of mistake you actually see, a sign error, a unit mix-up, whatever’s common in your subject, and it’ll build better traps.

The key is wrong. This will happen at some point, not always, but often enough that you check every time. Never publish a quiz without running that check prompt from above. The assistant isn’t accountable for a wrong key, you are, once it’s in front of a class.

It writes about things that aren’t in your source. Tell it to quote the line of the notes each question comes from, right there in the same prompt. If it can’t quote a source line, that’s your signal the question’s made up.

Questions people ask

Can I make a quiz with AI for free?

Yes. Any of the mainstream assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will write the questions on a free plan, and a separate free tool runs the quiz. None of these need you to pay extra for what's described here.

How do I create a quiz from my own notes rather than generic questions?

Paste in or upload your source material and tell the assistant to write questions only from that. If you skip this, it'll write generic questions from memory, which is where you get errors and off-syllabus content.

How do I check the AI answer key is correct?

Run a check prompt: ask it to check the key against the notes, saying correct or incorrect for each answer and quoting the line that proves it. Then check the key against the source line by line yourself, not skim it.

Which tool should I use to run the quiz, Google Forms or Kahoot?

Google Forms is free with a Google Account and probably the easiest starting point; turn on "Make this a quiz" in Settings and set the key and points. Kahoot! is the one for a live class game, with the free Kahoot! Go plan covering basic quiz and true/false questions.

What should I not upload when making a quiz with AI?

Don't upload pupil names, marks, or any personal data alongside your notes, just the content. Teachers should also check their school's policy on AI-made materials, and remember textbook chapters are copyrighted, so this is for your own class quiz only.

Keep exploring

If you liked turning notes into something usable, there’s more of this. “How to get AI to turn my notes into flashcards” covers the revision side of the same idea. “How to get AI to help me study for an exam” goes a level further, structured study rather than just one quiz. And if this was for a child rather than a class, “How to get AI to help my child learn” is worth a look too.

Sources and review notes

Review date: 2026-09-22