How to Create an Online Exam with AI

Most quiz platforms are built around the live game: everyone in the room, questions on the projector, leaderboard between rounds. Homework keeps the same quiz but changes how students take it. Each student opens it on their own device, at their own time, and it is never timed.

Homework runs in one of two ways. Practice shows one question at a time, in order, and can allow retries. Test is the one for exams: students move between the questions in any order, change an answer, and hand in once, and nothing is marked until they do. You set the deadline and choose when students see the correct answers. Students join with a 6-digit PIN, a QR code or a link, so there is no class period to coordinate and no projector required. That makes it work as a take-home test, a catch-up for absent students, or a practice set.

The slow part of building an exam was never the settings screen. It is writing 20 solid questions. Sheelon's AI does that part in under a minute, two ways:

• From a topic. Type what the exam covers, for example "photosynthesis, 8th grade, medium difficulty", choose how many questions you want (5 to 20), and the AI drafts the full question set.
• From a document. Upload the chapter, study guide, or slide deck as a PDF, Word or PowerPoint file (up to 10 MB) and the AI writes questions grounded in your own material. From a PDF it also reads the diagrams and charts. Students get tested on what you actually taught, not a generic version of the topic.

Either way, you review the draft before anything reaches students. Fix wording, swap a weak answer option, delete a question that misses the point. Expect the review to take a few minutes, not the evening. AI generation is included on the free plan with a lifetime allowance of 5 generated quizzes (50 questions in total), and Pro removes the cap.

The same quiz becomes either a low-stakes practice set or a real exam depending on a few settings. This is the combination that works for most classes:

For a practice run, retries plus instant answers turn the quiz into a study loop: students retake it until they stop missing the same questions. For an exam, one hand-in with answers held back until the deadline keeps it fair across the whole class.

Open the homework from Homework in the sidebar. Its page shows how many students started and finished, the average score and each student's score, and a click on a name shows which questions that student got right and wrong. Full report and exports adds the accuracy of each question, so you can see which concepts the class missed and what to reteach. Reload the page to see new submissions.

If you want the scores in your gradebook, every plan can download the results as a CSV in two clicks, and Pro accounts can also export the full report to Excel or PDF. The walkthrough is in How to Export Quiz Results to PDF and Excel.

Homework, Test mode included, is on every plan, with no limit on how many students take it. AI generation starts on the free plan too: 5 AI-generated quizzes (up to 50 questions in total), enough to build and run your first exams. Pro adds all 10 question types, unlimited AI generation, team mode, and PDF and Excel exports. Current prices are on the pricing page.