Making a quiz with Hot Potatoes
A while back I started getting certifications such as CISSP, CEH, ECSA and CSSLP. Many questions are multiple choice and can often be found in books at the end of a chapter. I like to read a paper version of the book, but I often find it a bit frustrating to make those questions within a book. Somewhere deep in my memory, I remembered that we used to have an application to make practice tests.
Hot Potatoes
Years ago, when I was allowed to sit in class every day and prepare for tests, a teacher introduced us to a great application to make practice tests. It’s called Hot Potatoes. I used to use it quite often to prepare for those tests with my fellow students. This way we could come up with multiple choice questions with answers and we shared these practice tests with each other.
Download
This application is freeware (no it is not open-source) and can be downloaded from: https://hotpot.uvic.ca/
When you first start up Hot Potatoes, you will be prompted for your username. This name is stored on your computer and not sent to anyone; it is inserted into your exercises to identify you as an author. You must provide a user name before you can use all the features of Hot Potatoes.
The whole suite offers six applications with which enables you to create different types of exercises :
- multiple-choice,
- short-answer,
- jumbled-sentence,
- crossword,
- matching/ordering
- gap-fill exercises All the applications can create a HTM file, which you can use in any browser.
Most of the time I used the multiple-choice application to create the quizes from the books which I used for certifications. After creating the practice questions, I exported the practice questions as an HTM file so that I could practice them in my browser. There are a lot of settings available, for example you can set a timer, change the order of answers (randomized) and even the questions could be randomized. In my opinion this is an awesome piece of software helping you to study.