Copy, Reuse or Import Questions in WatuPRO: What’s The Difference?

WatuPRO has several options that make managing and creation of lots of questions easy. Each of them has different purpose, so let’s dive into it:

Copy Questions

You can copy questions (and also grades and quiz settings) from one quiz to a new quiz that will be created on the fly or to an existing quiz. This feature is accessible from two places:

  • The Edit Quiz page -> link “Copy into another quiz” on top
  • The Manage Questions page -> link “Copy quiz and/or questions” above the table.

Here is how it looks:

When you copy questions you are creating their duplicates into the new quiz. You can then go and modify them in the new place and your changes will be applied on the copied questions only. This is exactly the same as re-making these questions manually, it just saves a lot of time.

So, “copy questions” is most suitable when you want to create new quizzes fast and these new quizzes will have similar settings and questions as the one you copied from. It’s good because you can make changes to them without affecting the originals.

But what if you want to have many quizzes pulling questions from question banks? If ten quizzes pull from a bank of 100 questions, it’s not a good idea to copy these questions at ten places – just one typo and you’ll have to edit it ten times.

This is where reusing is far more useful:

Reuse Questions

The “Reuse Questions” feature is part of the Intelligence module.

To reuse questions go to the Manage Questions page of the test and select the checkbox:

This super powerful feature lets you use just any other quiz in the system as a question bank and even combine multiple question banks into a single quiz in any way you can imagine.

Reusing does not create copies of the questions. It uses them “on the fly”. This means that if you want to change a question you can go to the original quiz where it’s created, change it there and the changes will automatically affect all tests which reuse this question.

So if you want slightly modified questions in another quiz, copy them. If you want exactly the same questions but perhaps in different order, from only some categories or with different quiz settings, then reuse.

From version 6.3.8 you can use the enhanced reuse questions feature as a question bank.

Import Questions

Another way of quickly creating questions is importing them from CSV (Excel) or Aiken (simple Moodle format) file (see exact formats available).

Importing lets you quickly adds a lot of questions if you prefer to use Excel or text file for creating them. It’s not good way of editing existing questions of a quiz: if you want to do this, you will have to delete the old questions when you import the edited one. So it’s best to use import only for initial creation.

Import also works great if you want to copy questions between different sites or sub-sites in a network – as long as they all run WatuPRO. Just export the questions from one site and import them to the other site.

Once the questions are imported into a quiz they can be copied and reused just like all other questions.