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ProProfs Quiz Maker A Quiz Engine worth Looking at

A few months back I received a complimentary educational license from ProProfs Quiz Maker Pro - an online quizzing engine. I havent had the time to look at it until now and I think its high time I repay the favour by ensuring that I can at least give you a high-level review of the tool.

First things first - ProProfs seems like a really easy to use, fairly intuitive quiz engine that beats the pants off quiz engines in popular LMSs like Moodle. Heres a quick blow by blow account of what Ive found in the hour that I played with the tool.

User Interface and Ease of Use
ProProfs claims to be the worlds easiest quizmaker. Im not too sure about that, though I can say that it is very simple to use.  You can edit quiz settings and add quiz questions from a single page. The fact that the page doesnt refresh each time you add a new question, means that you can get the bare bones structure of your quiz up in minutes. I do find the rich-text editor of the quiz engine to be quite limiting though, particularly because it lacks an HTML view for power users. I understand that this is not such a big deal for most quizzes, but for someone like me who is likely to fuss about how the quiz looks - creative controls are a big plus.

Quiz Authoring Capabilities
Proprofs allows you to author two types of quizzes - a scored quiz and a personality quiz. The scored quiz is what it says it is; an academic knowledge check. The personality quiz is more like the Facebook quizzes that we all seem to keep taking. Frankly, with the amount of research it takes to be able to create meaningful personality quizzes, I dont recommend this to the average instructional designer. That said, if you were keen to see an example of what I created in 10 minutes - here you go.

So moving to what most instructional designers will do with this tool -- scored quiz authoring. I am particularly impressed at how easy it is to create a quiz using ProProfs. I created this quiz in seven minutes flat! A great part of the design of this tool is that the interface doesnt look like a Boeing cockpit. You have limited options in there, but theyre definitely the most common options that instructional designers look for.

What I would like however is more options for question types that are conscpicuously absent - such as matching and sequencing. Im also not a big fan of knowledge checks. I like constructing assessments in form of scenarios and ProProfs does miss branching features sorely. I hope these features come up in future versions of the tool.

Reporting and Visualisations
ProProfs displays pretty standard, no fluff reports and visualisations for its quizzes. You can download the reports to Excel and do all sorts of manipulations with them. The tool also gives you pie-chart and bar-chart visualisations for your quiz statistics so you can get a quick snapshot of the results. In general, no much to complain about for an online tool.

Interoperability and Other Extras
As youll notice from the picture above, ProProfs allows you to share a quiz (or your quiz results) on popular social networks. It also gives you embed codes that you can place on your blog or website. I was particularly interested in the embed codes because I wanted to check if I could embed a ProProfs quiz into an Articulate project. Unfortunately the tool said I needed an upgrade to specify custom sizes for the embeddable gadget. I thought that was a bit strange, and I couldnt quite see the rationale. Otherwise the interoperability itself has no problems. The embeds work quite nicely on wiki and blog software. Heres a simple html page with the embed.

In addition, Im sure youve noticed the nice little certificate that you can generate for the people who take your quizzes. If thats something you wanted to generate for your students -- well all I can say is that ProProfs makes it really easy. 

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So thats all I wanted to tell about this new tool Ive just taken a look at. While it does lack a few features, I think the pricing is quite reasonable. $9.97/ month for business and $3.97/ month for education seems quite reasonable to me, especially if they can maintain a fast pace with upgrades. The tools free for personal use, just in case you want to check it out.

I hear theyre also doing a promotion so you can win a free license. Im not sure how you can win, but I guess if any ProProfs people are reading this post - please drop the details in the comments section. If youve tried the tool, please feel free to fill in any blanks that I may have left in this review. Im sure itll help provide a well rounded perspective on the application.

Available link for download