How to Create a Quiz with AI: From Topic to Ready-to-Play

A typical 10-question multiple choice quiz takes an experienced teacher 30 to 45 minutes to write from scratch: formulating questions clearly, writing plausible wrong answers, avoiding ambiguity, and double-checking facts. For a teacher who runs 3 quizzes per week across 2 classes, that is 3 to 4 hours of quiz writing every week.

AI quiz generation does not replace your judgment. It eliminates the mechanical work, the drafting, the distractor writing, the formatting, so your time goes into the 5-minute review that actually needs your expertise.

Sheelon's AI quiz form takes three kinds of input: a topic, your own text, or a file, alone or together. Each one produces the same thing, a complete editable quiz, but each shines in a different situation:

The quality of the draft tracks the quality of the brief. Compare:

1. Specific topic. "The causes of World War I", not just "history".
2. Grade level. "9th grade" or "AP level" in the topic calibrates vocabulary and reasoning depth. The difficulty itself is set under Quiz settings.
3. Number of questions. Set it under Quiz settings: 10 to 15 is the classroom sweet spot, 20 is the most per generation, and Auto lets the AI size the quiz to your material.
4. Question types (optional). In Quiz settings, choose which question types are allowed. The AI picks the mix from those.
5. Focus areas (optional). Put something like "Focus on causes and effects, not dates" under Instructions to keep a broad topic on-curriculum.

Under Your own material, click Paste text. The box takes up to 8,000 characters of your own material, such as an article, your lesson notes, a syllabus section or a case study. Under Instructions, say what to emphasize, what to skip, what tone to take, and which misconceptions to test.

This is the method for anything the AI should not improvise: a news article you want discussed tomorrow, the exact passage your class read, or a quiz that must probe one specific argument. An instruction like "Focus on the author's evidence, not vocabulary. Two questions should test whether students spotted the counterargument in paragraph 4" gives you a draft that a topic alone could never produce. For the full walkthrough of turning one article into a complete test, see the AI test generator that works from any article.

Upload the actual teaching material and the AI writes questions grounded in exactly what you taught. Under Your own material, click Upload a file, set the number of questions and the difficulty under Quiz settings, and click Generate quiz. PDFs and photos are read directly, including diagrams, charts, and figures, so a labeled-cell diagram in the chapter can become a question about the diagram. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files are read as text, and for a long file only about the first 5 pages. A file can be up to 10 MB, which comfortably fits a full textbook chapter as a PDF.

The advantage over topic prompts is alignment: questions use your wording, your examples, your framing. Students get assessed on what happened in your classroom, not on the AI's general model of the subject. For the full walkthrough, see the PDF-to-quiz guide.

AI drafting is fast, not infallible. Plan a 3 to 5 minute review pass:

A well-specified brief typically needs edits on 1 or 2 questions out of 10. A vague one needs 4 or 5. The minute spent on the brief pays for itself in review. If quiz drafting is one part of a larger prep problem, our roundup of AI tools for the classroom covers lesson planning, slides, and grading too.