How to Make a Quiz With AI (5 Steps + Copy-Paste Prompts)

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You walked the new hire through the expense policy. You ran the workshop, sent the slides, and everyone nodded. Two weeks later the same questions land in your inbox, and you realise you never knew what actually stuck.

Here is how to make a quiz with AI: give ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini your own material (the policy, the slides, the training notes), tell it who the quiz is for and what they must be able to do, and ask for 8 to 10 questions with an answer key that quotes the line each answer comes from. Check every answer against your document. Then paste the questions into Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, switch on quiz mode, and the form scores it for you. If your plan includes Gemini in Google Forms or Copilot in Microsoft Forms, they can draft the quiz inside the form straight from your file. A first 10-question quiz takes most people around 20 minutes, and most of that is the checking.

Below: the five steps, prompts you can copy, a worked example, how to quiz from a PDF, and what to fix when the questions come out too easy or plain wrong.

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Why a short quiz is worth 20 minutes

A quiz is not only a test. Pulling an answer out of your own memory helps you keep it far better than reading the same page again. Psychologists call this the testing effect or retrieval practice, and it has been studied for more than a century (Wikipedia, Testing effect). In a well-known experiment, students who took a test on a text remembered more of it a week later than students who spent that time studying it again (Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science, 2006).

For your work that means two things. The people who take your quiz remember the policy or the process better. And you get a list of the questions most people missed, which tells you exactly which part of your training needs a better explanation. Google Forms, for example, shows you the frequently missed questions in its quiz summary (Google Docs Editors Help, Create and grade quizzes).

What AI does well here is the slow part: turning a dense page into clear questions with believable wrong options. What it does badly is knowing whether an answer is right for your company. That part stays with you.

What you need

A chat assistant: ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. The free plans are enough for this. New to them? Start with our ChatGPT tutorial for beginners, the Claude tutorial for beginners or the Gemini tutorial for beginners.
Your source material: the document, slides, process description or meeting notes the quiz is about. Without it, the AI writes generic questions about the topic in general, not about what you taught.
A form tool with a quiz mode: Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. Both let you mark the correct answer, give points and show feedback (Google Forms help, Microsoft Forms help).

Step 1: Decide what people must be able to do (2 minutes)

Most weak quizzes test trivia: “In what year was the policy introduced?” Nobody needs that. Before you open the AI, finish this sentence: After this training, people should be able to…

“…submit an expense claim correctly the first time.”
“…tell a customer our refund rules without checking with a manager.”
“…spot a phishing email and know who to report it to.”

Pick two or three of these. They become the instruction that keeps the AI on the questions that matter.

Step 2: Give the AI your material (2 minutes)

Paste the text into the chat, or upload the file. Shorter is better: one policy or one module per quiz, not the whole handbook. If your material lives in a recording, turn it into text first with our guide on how to transcribe audio with AI.

One honest warning: check what your company allows before you upload internal documents to a chat assistant. If in doubt, remove names, client details and figures first. The questions work just as well without them.

Step 3: Ask for the quiz with this prompt (3 minutes)

This prompt does the heavy lifting. Copy it, fill in the brackets, and put your material under it.

Write a quiz based ONLY on the material below.

Who takes it: [e.g. new sales staff in their first week]
After the quiz they should be able to: [your 2 or 3 goals from step 1]

Rules:
- 10 questions: 7 multiple choice (4 options), 3 short answer.
- Test understanding and real situations, not dates or trivia.
- Wrong options must be believable mistakes a real person makes.
- No "all of the above", no trick questions, no double negatives.
- Keep the correct option about the same length as the others.

After the questions, give an answer key. For every answer:
the correct option, one sentence explaining why, and the exact
line from the material it is based on.
If the material does not answer something, do not invent it.
List it at the end under "Gaps in the material".

Material:
[paste here]

The last part matters most. Asking for the exact source line turns your check in step 4 from guesswork into a quick comparison. The “Gaps” list is a bonus: it often shows you what your training document forgot to explain.

Step 4: Check every question against the source (8 minutes)

Do not skip this. AI tools can write answers that sound right and are not. Microsoft says the same about its own quiz assistant: the content it generates can be incomplete or inaccurate, so double-check it (Microsoft Support, Copilot in Forms FAQ).

For each question, ask yourself four things:

Is the answer in the quoted line? Find that line in your document. If it is not there, or says something slightly different, fix or delete the question.
Is exactly one option right? If a colleague could argue for two, rewrite one of them.
Would someone who skipped the training get it wrong? If the answer is common sense, the question tests nothing.
Does it match how things really work here? Documents go out of date. You know that the policy says 30 days but finance now wants receipts in 14.

Then let the AI review its own work once:

Review this quiz as a strict trainer. For each question tell me:
is the answer fully supported by the material, could more than
one option be argued as correct, and is it guessable without
the training? Suggest a better version for any weak question.

Step 5: Put it in Google Forms or Microsoft Forms (5 minutes)

Google Forms. Open a new form, go to Settings and turn on “Make this a quiz”. Add each question, then use “Answer key” to mark the right option and set the points. “Add answer feedback” lets you show your one-sentence explanation after someone answers. Under the respondent settings you choose whether people see missed questions and correct answers (Google Docs Editors Help).

Microsoft Forms. Choose New Quiz, add your questions, tick the Correct answer mark next to the right option and fill in the points. You can add a message per answer that people see when they choose it (Microsoft Support, Create a quiz with Microsoft Forms).

Let the form do the drafting (if your plan has it). With an eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plan, “Help me create a form” in Google Forms can generate a quiz with correct answers and points marked, and you can point it at a Doc, Slides deck or PDF from your Drive. It works on desktop and is still rolling out, so you may not see it yet (Google Docs Editors Help, Create a form with Gemini). In Microsoft Forms, Copilot can draft a quiz from a description or from pasted text when you have a Microsoft 365 account with a Copilot license (Microsoft Support). Either way, step 4 still applies: check the answer key before you send it.

Before you share it, take the quiz yourself once on your phone. You will catch the question with two right answers faster that way than by reading.

A worked example (made up, so you can see the flow)

Say you run a small agency and you want new starters to get expense claims right. Your goal from step 1: “submit an expense claim correctly the first time.” You paste your one-page expense policy under the prompt. Three of the ten questions that come back look like this:

1. You took a client to lunch. What do you need to submit
   with the claim?
   a) Only the card statement
   b) The itemised receipt and the client's name
   c) The receipt, but only if it is over the limit
   d) Nothing, client lunches go through the account manager

2. A train ticket for a project trip cost more than the
   travel limit. What do you do?
   a) Split it over two claims
   b) Ask your manager to approve it before booking
   c) Book it and explain later
   d) Pay the difference yourself

3. (Short answer) Within how many days after the expense
   must you submit your claim?

Answer key
1. b. Client meals need proof of who attended.
   Source: "Client meals: attach the itemised receipt and
   the name of the client."
2. b. Spending above the limit needs approval in advance.
   Source: "Anything above the limit must be approved by
   your manager before you book."
3. 30 days. Source: "Submit claims within 30 days."

Now the check. Question 3 quotes “30 days”, but you know finance changed it to 14 last month. So you fix the quiz and the policy document. That is the kind of thing only you can catch, and it is why step 4 matters more than step 3. (The policy lines above are invented for this example.)

How to make a quiz from a PDF or slide deck

Gemini Notebook. Google’s notebook tool (formerly called NotebookLM, renamed in July 2026) can turn your uploaded sources into a quiz. Open a notebook, add your PDF or slides, and in the Studio panel choose “Quizzes”. With the pencil icon you can set the difficulty and add a prompt for the audience and focus. While answering, there is a hint button and an “Explain” option (Gemini Notebook Help, Generate Flashcards or Quizzes). Google has since added more formats, such as short-answer, multi-select and fill-in-the-blank questions (Google blog, October 2026). It is great for testing yourself on a long report before a meeting. To collect scores from a team, a form is the better home.

ChatGPT or Claude with the step 3 prompt. Upload the PDF and change “the exact line” to “the exact line and page number”. The page numbers make your check twice as quick. For very long files, our guides on analysing long PDF files with Claude and turning a PDF into notes with Claude show how to get the material into a usable shape first.

Copy-paste quiz prompts for work

Onboarding knowledge check. Pairs well with our guide on using AI for employee onboarding.

From this onboarding document, write 8 situation-based multiple choice questions a new hire should get right by the end of week one. Each question starts with a realistic situation ("A customer asks..."). Answer key with the source line for each.

After a workshop or training session.

Here are the slides and my notes from today's session. Write 5 short questions people can answer in 3 minutes tomorrow morning to recall the key points. Mix 3 multiple choice and 2 short answer. Only use what is in the material.

Turning a process into a quiz. If you already have written procedures (see how to use AI to write SOPs), quiz the steps that go wrong most:

From this procedure, write 6 questions about the steps people most often get wrong or do in the wrong order. Include one question where the reader must put 4 steps in the right order.

Quiz yourself before an important meeting.

Quiz me on this report, one question at a time. Wait for my answer, tell me if I am right, quote the passage, then ask the next question. Start easy and get harder. Stop after 10 and list what I missed.

Multiple choice or short answer?

Multiple choice is easy to score automatically, which is why forms love it. Short answers make people work harder to recall, and research summaries report larger learning gains from short-answer questions than from multiple choice, and feedback after a quiz helps learning too (Wikipedia, Testing effect). A practical mix: mostly multiple choice for the facts that must be exact, plus two or three short answers for the things people need to explain in their own words. Always switch on the answer feedback, so a wrong answer becomes a small lesson instead of just a lost point.

Quiz or survey?

They live in the same form tools, but they do different jobs. A quiz has right answers and checks what people know. A survey has no right answers and asks what people think. Want to know whether the training was useful or what people still find confusing? That is a survey, and our guide on how to use AI to create a survey covers it. Many trainers send both: a short quiz, then two survey questions at the end.

When the quiz comes out wrong: quick fixes

The questions are too easy. Ask: “Rewrite every question as a realistic situation where the reader has to apply the rule, not repeat it.”
The right answer is always the longest one. A classic giveaway. Ask: “Make all four options similar in length and detail, and shuffle which letter is correct.”
It added facts that are not in your document. Repeat the rule: “Only use the material. Delete any question you cannot back up with a quote.”
The wrong options are silly. Ask: “Replace each wrong option with a mistake a real new employee might actually make.”
The answer key is wrong. Fix it by hand in the form. Do not ask the AI to “double check” and trust the second answer without looking at your document.

Questions people ask

Can ChatGPT make a quiz?

Yes. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can all write quiz questions with an answer key from text you give them. They do not score your team’s answers, though. For that, put the questions into Google Forms or Microsoft Forms.

Can I make a quiz with AI for free?

Yes. The free plans of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini are enough to write the questions, and both Google Forms and Microsoft Forms have a quiz mode. The built-in AI drafting inside the forms needs a paid plan: an eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plan for Gemini in Forms, and a Copilot license for Copilot in Microsoft Forms.

Can AI make a quiz from a PDF?

Yes. Upload the PDF to ChatGPT or Claude with the step 3 prompt, use the Quizzes option in Gemini Notebook, or point Gemini in Google Forms at the PDF in your Drive if your plan has it.

Should I use quiz scores to judge employees?

We would not. Keep training quizzes low-stakes: they are there to help people learn and to show you what to explain better. Microsoft also lists employment-related situations, such as evaluating performance, among the things its Copilot in Forms should not be used for (Microsoft Support).

How many questions should a work quiz have?

For a knowledge check after one topic, 5 to 10 questions is a good range: long enough to cover your two or three goals, short enough that people finish it on their phone between meetings. That is a rule of thumb from practice, not a research number.

Sources

Your next 20 minutes

Pick the one document you explain most often. Write down what people should be able to do after reading it, run the step 3 prompt, check the answers, and put the quiz in a form. Next time someone joins, you send them the document and the quiz, and you see straight away which part still needs a better explanation.

Want more practical AI workflows like this, step by step?