Which tool to choose
There's no "best" tool in absolute terms: it depends on what you have to deliver and to whom.
You want a written assessment on paper or in PDF, starting from your notes. Use ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) or Gemini (gemini.google.com). They're the most flexible: you paste the text, ask for the format you want, and get questions plus answer key in one go. It's the route we explain step by step below.
You teach and want an interactive quiz that students play from their phone or smartboard. Wayground, the platform that until 2024 was called Quizizz. It lets you create a quiz from a text, a link, a video, or a file, and grades the students' work for you.
You need something completely free, with no usage caps and aligned with school curricula. Khanmigo from Khan Academy. It creates multiple-choice questions aligned with standards and is 100% free for teachers. On top of that, you export the quiz to Google Forms to send to students.
You have to turn a long PDF (handout, article, manual) into questions. Quizgecko or Smallpdf. Smallpdf's tool takes any PDF document and derives questions and answers from it to test and study, suitable for both teachers and students.
If you're a private individual, a student, or a trainer making a quick assessment, stop at the first profile: ChatGPT or Gemini are more than enough. The dedicated tools make sense when you need interactivity in class or automatic export to a platform.
How to do it
This procedure uses ChatGPT or Gemini, because they give you maximum control over format and difficulty. From a browser or from the app, the path doesn't change.
- Open a new conversation on ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) or Gemini (gemini.google.com).
- Prepare the material: copy the text of the lesson, chapter, or notes you want questions on. If it's a PDF, keep it ready to attach (the paperclip or "+" icon in the message bar).
- Paste the prompt below, replacing only the parts in quotes with your data, and then paste your material underneath.
The operational syntax:
Act as a teacher expert in the subject. Generate an assessment
based exclusively on the text I paste below. Do not add
knowledge external to the text.
Parameters:
- Topic: "chlorophyll photosynthesis"
- Recipients: 8th-grade students
- Structure: 8 multiple-choice questions (4 options, only one correct)
+ 2 short open-ended questions
- Difficulty: medium, with at least 2 questions that require reasoning,
not just memory
- For each multiple-choice question, the 3 wrong answers must
be plausible and typical mistakes, not absurd ones
Deliver in two separate blocks:
1. "STUDENT VERSION": only the questions, numbered, without answers
2. "ANSWER KEY": the correct answer to each question with
one line of explanation
Reference text:
[paste the text here]
- Read the generated questions and correct any inaccuracies yourself (see the troubleshooting section below: this step is not optional).
- For changes, don't redo everything from scratch: reply in the same chat with targeted instructions, like "Replace question 4 with a harder one" or "Turn the open-ended questions into true/false."
Check: if you've done it right, you get two distinct blocks, the questions are all answerable using only the text you pasted, and no correct answer is "guessable" because the other three options are blatantly wrong.
If instead you want the interactive quiz on Wayground: inside the platform you look for the AI button, choose to start from a topic or a file, and generate. With the text option you provide a topic, a prompt, or an excerpt, and choose grade level and number of questions. By uploading a file you take it from the device or from Google Drive in PDF, Word, and PowerPoint formats. For text and files there are limits on the number of characters, size, and pages: you'll find them indicated on the upload screen.
A concrete example
Marco teaches history at a technical institute and needs an assessment on the French Revolution for the next day. He has his three pages of notes in Word.
He opens ChatGPT, pastes the prompt above changing the topic to "causes and phases of the French Revolution 1789-1799" and the recipients to "11th-grade students," then pastes the three pages underneath. In less than a minute he gets 8 multiple-choice questions and 2 open-ended ones, with the answer key.
Rereading, he notices that question 6 on the date of the storming of the Bastille is too easy for an 11th-grade class. He writes in the chat: "Replace question 6 with one that links the 1788 financial crisis to the convening of the Estates-General." ChatGPT regenerates only that one. Marco copies the "Student Version" block into Word, formats it in ten minutes, and prints. The answer key stays in his file. Total time: about a quarter of an hour against the well-over-an-hour of before.
When it does NOT work (and how to fix it)
If the AI invents answers or knowledge
It's the most serious risk, especially on dates, names, and numbers. The model can produce a "correct" answer that isn't correct. That's why the prompt has the line "based exclusively on the text I paste": by anchoring the AI to your material you greatly reduce the inventions. It remains a golden rule anyway: always reread the answer key before using it. On subjects with precise data (math, physics, accounting) check every solution by hand.
If the questions are all too easy or resemble each other
It happens when the prompt doesn't specify the difficulty. Reply in the chat explicitly asking for higher-level questions: Bloom's taxonomy (a framework that classifies questions from simple recall up to analysis and evaluation) is the reference used by professional tools. Write "Rewrite the questions according to the high levels of Bloom's taxonomy: application, analysis, and evaluation, not just memory."
If the wrong answers are too obvious
A quiz where the right option can be guessed at a glance assesses nothing. Ask the AI to build distractors (the wrong answers in a multiple-choice question) based on real mistakes. Insert into the prompt "the wrong options must reflect typical student misconceptions on this topic."
If you upload a PDF and the AI seems not to read it
Often the PDF is a scanned image, not selectable text. First try to select and copy a piece of text from the file: if you can't highlight it, it's a scan. In that case paste the text by hand, or run the file through an OCR tool (optical character recognition) to convert it into text: many free online PDF converters do it in one step. Also watch out for Wayground's limits on file size and pages: for long documents split them into multiple parts.
If you want a playable quiz and not just a text
ChatGPT gives you questions to paste, not a clickable quiz. If you need the interactive version with scores and a leaderboard, start directly from Wayground, or generate on Khanmigo and export the quiz to Google Forms to send to students.
A tip from someone who really uses it
The part that saves the most time isn't generating the questions, it's the automatic answer key. Always ask for it, even if you think you won't use it: you need it both to grade quickly and, above all, to notice right away if the AI got an answer wrong. When the model has to write in black and white "the answer is B because...," logical errors surface much more than in the question list alone. Keep it in a file separate from the version you hand out, so you don't risk printing the sheet with the solutions by mistake.
Frequently asked questions
Can I generate a quiz from a YouTube video?
Yes, with Wayground. You paste a YouTube link or use the Chrome extension to create quizzes from videos. With ChatGPT instead, if the video has subtitles, you copy the transcript and paste it as the reference text.
Which tool is really free with no surprises?
Khanmigo from Khan Academy is the most transparent: free for all teachers without limits thanks to Microsoft's support, with unlimited quizzes and questions, curriculum alignment, and answer keys with explanations. ChatGPT and Gemini have free plans more than sufficient for making assessments; Wayground is free in its basic features but reserves some AI features for the paid plans.
Can I export it to Word to print it?
With ChatGPT and Gemini you copy and paste the text directly into Word or Google Docs and format it however you want. With the dedicated tools, check the export option: Conker, for example, turns a topic into complete sets of questions exportable to Microsoft Forms or printable for the class.
Is a quiz made by AI worth as much as one written by me?
This is the point where many get stuck, and the honest answer is: it's worth as much as your review. The AI doesn't know your class, doesn't know what you emphasized in the lesson, and can get a fact wrong without realizing it. But you're not the one starting from a blank page: the AI does the first draft in a minute, you do the expert work that really matters, namely choosing what to ask and verifying that it's right. The time you recover on the mechanical part you invest in quality, you don't lose it.