A multiple choice question generator
that writes the three wrong answers too.
Paste your notes and get question stems with four lettered options and an answer key, each question showing the sentence it was built from.
No account, two generations a day, notes up to 25,000 characters free.
Open any question to see the line it came from. Paste 40 characters or more to start.
The hard part of a multiple choice question generator is the wrong answers
Writing the question is the easy half. Anyone with the notes in front of them can turn "the Calvin cycle fixes carbon dioxide in the stroma" into "where does the Calvin cycle take place?" in about four seconds. The slow half is the other three lines: options that are wrong, but wrong in a way that someone who half-learned the material would still consider.
That is where most generated question sets fall over. You get one real answer and three obvious throwaways, so the question tests whether you can spot the odd one out rather than whether you know the material. What this tool asks for instead is distractors drawn from the same passage as the answer — the other things your notes mention in the same breath, like a thylakoid membrane sitting next to a stroma — and options of roughly the same length, so the right one cannot be picked out by shape alone.
Whether a distractor is genuinely tempting is a judgement call, and not one we claim to have automated: that is what the source line under each question is for, and why reading the set before you use it takes a minute rather than none. Two things are enforced rather than asked for, though. No two options may be the same text, since the letter in the answer key would then be a coin flip. And "all of the above" is rejected outright, because an option that refers to the other options cannot be checked against the one sentence the question is built on. So is a stem that states its own answer, and an option the model tried to letter itself. A question that breaks any of those is dropped before it reaches your screen.
Stems, not blanks
What comes out
- Question stems that end in a question mark, up to 15 per run
- Four lettered options, A to D, with one marked correct
- An answer key you open when you want it, closed by default
- The line from your notes each question was built on, to vet it fast
- A numbered paper on the clipboard, with the key at the bottom
What does not
- Fill-in-the-blank items — those are the Quiz and Fill in the Blank tabs
- "All of the above" or "none of the above" options
- Essay, short-answer or long-response prompts
- A formatted exam paper, a marking scheme or a gradebook
- Questions about anything your pasted text does not cover
The distinction between a stem and a blank sounds cosmetic and is not. A cloze item — "the Calvin cycle runs in the ____" — is quicker to answer and better for drilling a term into memory, which is why it is what the Quiz tab writes. But you cannot hand it to a class as a test paper, and a letter-based key over a set of blanks reads as gibberish. Ask for a question and you get a question.
Where the answer key comes from
Each option is labelled by where it sits in the list, so the third option is C on the button and C in the key. The key is worked out from the questions on your screen at that moment, not stored alongside them, which is the part that matters when you press "Retry incorrect answers": the round shrinks to the four questions you missed, and the key renumbers to those four rather than still describing the set you started with.
Copy the set and the layout follows the same logic. Numbered stems first, lettered options under each, then a blank gap and ANSWER KEY with one letter per question at the very bottom. Paste that into a doc and you can cut the last block off before you print it.
Who ends up using it
Someone drafting a quiz on a Sunday night
You taught a chapter and you want twelve questions for Monday. Writing plausible distractors by hand is what makes that a one-hour job rather than a ten-minute one. Paste the handout, read down the set with the source lines open, delete the three questions that misread you, and copy the rest out as a paper with a key already attached.
Someone revising from their own notes
You have read the chapter twice and have no idea what stuck. Answering twelve questions built from your own material tells you in three minutes, and a wrong answer sends you to the exact sentence to reread instead of back to the top of the page. Leave the key closed until you are done, or it answers the set for you.
Where this multiple choice question generator stops
The questions can only be as good as the passage they came from. Feed it a page of keyword bullets and you get thin questions, because there is no stated claim to build a stem around and nothing nearby to make an honest distractor out of. Feed it prose and it does well. It writes recall questions and nothing else, so the applied and essay parts of an exam are still yours to prepare for, and it is not a past paper from anybody's board. What it does do — turn your own material into questions with a key you can check line by line — is the part worth getting right.
Answers before you paste anything in
How does this multiple choice question generator work?
Paste your notes, a chapter, or upload a PDF, and press Generate. Each question comes back as a stem ending in a question mark, four lettered options, and the sentence from your text that the question was built on. Answer them on the page to score yourself, or open the answer key and copy the whole set out as a numbered paper. No account, and the first question usually lands in a couple of seconds.
Where does the answer key come from?
It is read off the options you can see. Each option is labelled by its position in the list, A through D, and the key lists the letter of the correct one for every question. The letter itself is never stored anywhere: it is worked out from the set on your screen each time it is drawn, so the key and the buttons cannot drift apart. If you retry only the questions you got wrong, the key renumbers to match that shorter round.
How is this different from the Quiz tab?
They produce two different artefacts from the same notes. Quiz writes cloze items — a sentence with one blank and four options for the gap. This writes question stems: "Which artery carries deoxygenated blood?" with four full answers under it. If you are drilling recall for yourself, the cloze version is often faster. If you need something that looks like a test paper, or an answer key with letters in it, you want this one.
Can I use the questions in a class or an exam?
Yes, and you should read them first. The questions are built from the text you paste, so they are only ever as on-spec as your material, and each one shows the line it came from so you can vet the set in a glance. Copy them out and you get numbered stems, lettered options, then the answer key on its own at the bottom — that ordering is deliberate, so a handout does not carry its answers next to the questions.
Why did I get fewer questions than I expected?
Every question has to quote a sentence that really exists in your text, and any that cannot are dropped before you see them. Two other things get dropped here specifically: a stem written as a fill-in-the-blank instead of a question, and a set where two of the four options say the same thing, since that would give one question two correct letters. Short or bullet-point notes hit those limits sooner than full prose does.
Related tools
Or start from the QuizPaste home page, where the same tool takes any text you paste.
QuizPaste generates practice questions from text you provide. It is not affiliated with any exam board or testing body, and the questions it writes are not an official paper.