About this guide
This user guide explains how you can create and share your own skills
assessment or other tests through our website.
You'll be able to share tests that you create with friends, relatives and
acquaintances, but they won't be visible on our website (obviously).
Anyone with whom you share your test will be able to do it anonymously and free
of charge.
Before continuing, we recommend that you take one of our existing published tests here:
Choose a category of test (the tests are free and anonymous, so you won't lose anything if you choose an unfamiliar topic and answer every question wrongly!).
You can then choose a test:
At the time of writing this is our most popular test, having been taken over 120,000 times.
Read the instructions, then scroll down and begin your test!
When you're ready to begin, click this button.
When you finish, you'll be able to see your results, and also share them with
friends and colleagues. Try it and see!
Understanding the Anatomy of a Test
Each test is divided into topics and levels - here are the
ones for the Excel 2016 test shown above, for example:
This test has 5 topics and 3 levels.
You don't have any control over the levels - these are always set to
Introduction, Intermediate and Advanced
- although you don't have to have questions at every level. By contrast
the topics are specific to each test. For the above test they are:
|
Topic |
What it's about |
|
Formulae |
Creating and editing formulae in Excel |
|
General topics |
Miscellaneous Excel topics |
|
Formatting and printing |
What it says! |
|
Charts |
Creating and editing charts |
|
Tables (data) |
Sorting, filtering and pivoting data |
You may choose not to divide your test up into topics, but you must still create at least one of them.
How question pools work
For our published tests we have created a pool of questions, to make it less
likely that people will get repeat questions if they repeat a test. We've
specified that anyone doing the Excel test, for example, should have 20 minutes to answer 20
questions:
The internal settings for this test.
Our example test has 151 questions allocated
to it:
Different topics have different weightings.
Whenever anyone chooses to do a test, an algorithm will randomly allocate
questions in proportion to their frequency. For the example above, the 20
questions will be allocated insofar as possible in the following proportions,
subject to their being at least one question for each level and category, where
possible:
So roughly a quarter of the questions (26.5%) will be on the
General Topics category, for example.
What all this means in practice is that you don't have to worry too much
about how many questions you create for each level and topic, as our algorithm
will weight them correctly.
How questions work
Every
question is structured in the same way - here's an example (taken from the
Excel test again, as it happens):
A reasonably typical question.
This is a good question - it's at the Introductory level because anyone who
has used Excel at all should know the answer. Here are the parts you will
have to create for every question you create:
|
Part
|
Notes |
|
Your name for this question |
This is the name by which you will be able to search for
and find questions, so choose something descriptive. In the example above,
I've called the question In middle of copying. No user
will ever see this. |
|
Topic / level |
You set these before creating any question (although you can also use the drop
lists shown to change them at any time). |
|
The start and end of the question |
The text you enter here appears before and after the picture. |
|
Picture for question |
Every question MUST have a picture (there is a maximum size, which is currently
1 megabyte). This can be in any common format. We use
SnagIt for our
screen captures. |
|
The correct answer |
Type in the correct answer to the question. |
|
Wrong answers |
It doesn't matter in what order you put these, as our system shuffles
the four answers into random order for each new test taken. |
Logging on to our site
You won't be able to create a test unless you first create an account on our website:
After you click on this button, you can sign in (or create an account) in the usual Internet way.
After you've signed in, your user name will appear:
Your user name
will show on the button.
You can then go to the skills part of our website:
You can see I've already created a test on crossword knowledge - for the purposes of this blog, I'm going to create another test on Scrabble
knowledge.
Creating a test
Click on the CREATE A NEW TEST button shown
above to create a new test:
My test is only going to have a single question, and I'm going to give people 5 minutes to answer it. I'll make it available for general use later.
Adding topics
You must now add at least one topic:
Click on the
Questions tab, and choose to add a topic as shown.
For each topic, you must specify a title and a sort order:
The topics will appear in the sort order you specify. It doesn't matter what numbers you use, as long as each topic's sort order is different (and non-zero).
Adding questions
Time now to start adding questions!
The grid shows how many questions you've created for each topic and level.
Click on the button to add a question.
After clicking to add a
question, enter an internal name for your question (no one but you will see
this) and assign it to a category and level:
I'm creating an introductory question in my
Tiles topic.
You can now start the rest of your
question:
To add a picture, click on the button shown above and choose where your file
is stored:
I called my picture
J.png.
When you click on the UPLOAD
button, you should see your picture:
If you don't like this, you can click on the button to change it.
You can now fill in the rest of the question:
Notice the first wrong answer suggests that there isn't another tile worth 8 points (something you might believe if you didn't play Scrabble regularly).
When you save your changes, your question(s) will appear in a list:
You can either add more questions, or return to your question grid by pressing CANCEL.
Cancelling out of the screen above will return you to your question grid:
I've created one introductory question, no intermediate and no advanced questions.
Publishing your test
When you're ready to share your test, change its status:
Go to the
Test details tab and choose to make your test current (then save your changes).
Be careful not to make your test current too early. Once people have
started taking it, adding or changing questions will mean that you will no
longer be comparing like with like when you look at people's results.
Sharing your test
You can try your test out by clicking on this button:
Click here to take your test, but also to get the website address to share.
Alternatively, if you just want to share a link to your test, right-click on it
and copy the link:
This screen shot was from Edge, but Chrome and other browsers will look similar.
If you want to try my Scrabble test to see how well you do, here's the link:
Go to this page, and then add the rest of the URL (website address) as shown above.
Taking your test
If you choose to take your own test, you can now work your way through your
questions, answering each in turn:
How your test appears to the world.
When you've finished, you can give your name:
The name
you type in will appear at the top of the test results.
People who take your test have a host of ways of sharing their results with you:
Some of the ways of sharing test results.
And finally ...
If you have any suggestions for changes or improvements, do let us know!
