How to Write a Reading Quiz That Actually Works: Lessons from Years of Mistakes

“Uggghhh . . . rivets.”

Steph still remembers hearing about the notorious AP Lit reading quiz for Heart of Darkness—two years before she even took the class. Did she get the answer right when she was a student, thanks to this preview? No idea, but the memory of the impossible “rivets” question has lasted for decades.

The reading quiz is a staple in English classes: we ask our students to read outside of class, and, knowing that humans are humans, we give them a quiz to hold them accountable for that reading. But how often do we think about the quality of those reading quizzes?

We made a lot of reading quiz mistakes during our time in the classroom.

Steph’s first year teaching AP Lit, she didn’t even assign reading quizzes. Um, what? In a discussion-based course, trusting students to do the reading without any accountability only led to surface-level discussions and a room full of frustrated people.

As we began collaborating more closely, we decided to create reading quizzes that would be cheat-proof—only possible to pass if students actually read.

The result? For years, we spent hours grading short-answer reading quizzes in which half the class failed, leaving us to alternate between feeling like either terrible teachers or impossibly harsh graders. Turns out we were neither (though we have some former students who might disagree); instead, we were just asking the wrong questions.

It may have taken us too many years to learn this lesson, but what we learned about quiz design ultimately made life better for us and our students. We want to share what we learned about writing reading quizzes that actually work.

Our First Mistake: Not Having Reading Quizzes at All

Why did Steph start her AP Lit career without giving a reading quiz for each assigned text?

Honestly, it’s been too long to remember (and present-day Steph thinks this is NUTS), but it was likely an overestimation of students’ responsibility. As an overachiever who failed to finish only one assigned novel—Anna Karenina—in all of high school and college, she assumed that other AP students would be equally eager to complete their assigned reading.

The result, of course, was that students didn’t read, relying instead on SparkNotes summaries. This was a problem in a discussion-based course: students struggled to discuss the novel in any depth, unable to support broad generalizations with specific evidence. We’d ask a question and get vague responses or awkward silence—or worse, confident claims based entirely on SparkNotes that were just wrong.

Discussion-based courses require students to come prepared, and while we didn’t fully fix this problem until we started assigning guided reading questions alongside the reading, these superficial discussions highlighted for us that reading quizzes serve a legitimate pedagogical purpose.

Unfortunately, adding quizzes initially made everything worse.

Our Second Mistake: Reading Quizzes That Tested the Wrong Thing

We thought adding a reading quiz to each novel unit would be enough to inspire our students to read, but we asked the wrong questions, frustrating ourselves and our students.

We assigned students a selection of open-ended questions: they selected one and provided a written response in 15–20 minutes. We then graded the response holistically: plus, check-plus, check, check-minus, or minus).

As an example, here’s the first option we gave students for Frankenstein, along with the overall directions:

Pretty much the only thing we did “right” with this quiz was provide the reminder that “tragic” doesn’t mean “sad.”

This is a perfectly appropriate question to ask about Frankenstein. The problem is that this is the first thing we asked our students to do after reading. No guided reading questions, no discussion, no lecture. Just read the novel and respond to this prompt—with analysis and a complex theme.

As you’d expect, most of our students failed these quizzes, and we can count the number of As over multiple years on one hand. Our students felt defeated, and we felt like terrible teachers (not to mention, these quizzes were absolute torture to grade).

Looking back now, we can see that this wasn’t really a reading quiz: it tested what students would understand after teaching, not what they could understand from reading alone. We asked for sophisticated analysis before our students had the tools to deliver it. We also provided minimal instruction about what a good answer looks like, and our grading system was entirely subjective. We were essentially asking students to write a mini-essay immediately after reading. 
If we had taught at a school where students came to us already prepared to pass the AP Lit exam, this might have worked. But this wasn’t our population, and it took us a long time to realize that our quizzes were part of the problem.

The Turning Point: What a Reading Quiz Should Actually Test

Over time, we finally understood the fundamental principle we’d missed: Reading quizzes should test what students can know on their own, not what they’ll understand after we teach them.

Immediately after reading, we just want to test comprehension. Did our students read? Do they understand what happened in the text?

It’s after the discussion that we can test literary analysis. Do our students understand the significance of the literary elements in the text? Can they apply what we discussed to a larger theme?

Reading quizzes do matter. We need our students to come to class with a basic understanding of plot so that we can spend our limited class time going deeper—analyzing literary elements, identifying themes, and examining the “how” of literature that our novice scholars miss.

So, we shifted our approach. We developed reading check quizzes for novels in the form of multiple-choice comprehension tests (25–30 questions) that asked about characters and plot. We still gave these quizzes before the discussion, but they now held students accountable for reading, not analyzing.

This shift, paired with our addition of guided reading questions, led to discussions that went beyond the surface level. Our students knew what happened, so we could focus on how, why, and so what, and they could provide details to support their claims. Our discussions became productive rather than painful.

More importantly, however, students’ grades began to reflect their effort. Instead of half the class failing, most students now earned As and Bs on these comprehension quizzes—finally being appropriately rewarded for actually doing the reading. And we were no longer wasting hours grading written responses that were essentially just a pre-test. We could save our grading energy for students’ end-of-novel assessments.

How to Write Effective Reading Comprehension Questions

Once we understood what to test, we had to learn how to test it effectively.

Focus on Plot and Character Understanding

If our goal was to measure whether students had read, we needed to stick to the 5 Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Do our students know who the characters are and what they’re doing throughout the story?

We started every reading quiz with 10–15 straightforward character identification questions. Students had a bank of characters, and they matched them to descriptions like this one from Pride and Prejudice: “Almost ruins her family by eloping with an officer.”

Then, we included approximately 10 quotation identification questions where students used the same bank of characters to identify who said a quotation. The purpose of these quotation identification questions is to measure students’ understanding of key characters beyond the superficial descriptions they might have encountered on SparkNotes or Course Hero. To avoid being overly tricky, it’s important to select significant quotations that clearly reflect key plot points or character traits.

The remaining multiple-choice questions focused on key plot events, cause and effect, and (in some cases) the background information we’d provided students before they began reading.

Include Strategic “Close Reading” Questions

We want our reading quizzes to reflect whether students actually read the original text, so we always add a few questions that reward those who did read and keep skimmers and Internet summary readers from earning a perfect score.

Here are two examples from Pride and Prejudice:

Over the years, we noticed many students assumed Elizabeth’s emotional reaction to Mr. Darcy’s first proposal and subsequent letter indicated a realization that she loved him—a common mistake for students who haven’t read carefully or rely on romantic comedy tropes.

If students have read carefully, Mr. Darcy mentions Elizabeth’s “fine eyes” a lot. But students who haven’t read carefully are primed to think it’s her fiery personality—partly because of romantic tropes and partly because it’s what we, as the reader, notice and love most about her. (It’s important to word these carefully. Mr. Darcy does love Elizabeth’s personality, making A tempting, but the text shows she will concede when she’s wrong, and he explicitly critiques both B and C elsewhere in the novel.)

The entire test wasn’t comprised of these close reading questions: Pride and Prejudice is a challenging text, and we had a wide range of reading abilities within our classrooms. Sprinkling in a few trickier questions simply checks whether students read carefully rather than skimming summaries.

You can’t fight every battle with cheating (we finally acknowledge, after many years of trying to do so), but you can make it hard to get an A with SparkNotes, Course Hero, and ChatGPT alone.

Make Questions Clear and Specific

We spent a lot of time making our tests fair: eliminating vague wording, confirming clearly correct answers, and writing distractors that made sense for students who misread. Tests that are too easy don’t hold students accountable. Having each other to read drafts with fresh eyes helped immensely—we highly recommend collaborating with another teacher whenever possible.

How Many Questions and When

For novels, we asked students 25–30 questions and administered the quizzes after students read but before we began discussion. Students had about 20 minutes to complete these quizzes, and we often paired them with released multiple-choice passages from AP Lit exams, weaving that practice throughout the year.

This was our approach for AP Literature. With younger or less advanced students, we would assign these quizzes in smaller chunks—after each act in a Shakespeare play or every few chapters in a novel. This makes the reading more manageable and allows opportunities for course correction partway through the novel for students who aren’t reading.

The Grading Relief

Because the quizzes were multiple-choice, they could be easily graded with a Scantron, Google Forms, or other auto-grading tools. There are also clear, correct answers, which means no subjective decision-making is required. These reading accountability quizzes now took minimal grading time instead of the hour-plus of torture we’d been subjecting ourselves to.

You don’t have to write these questions yourself. You can use curated test banks (like our resources for The Hunger Games and Romeo and Juliet), but understanding what makes good comprehension questions helps you select the best questions for your students.

What Changed When We Fixed Our Reading Quizzes

Improving our reading quizzes wasn’t a magic bullet that fixed all of our problems. But it did produce tangible results.

Student Success Rates

Our original quizzes produced way too many failing scores, even from students who had done the reading. Once we made the change, most of our students got As and Bs on novel comprehension quizzes. More importantly, we and our students felt the quizzes were fair: students were being tested on what they read, not on what they hadn’t learned yet.

Discussion Quality

Paired with our addition of guided reading questions, improving our reading quizzes increased the number of students who came to class familiar enough with the text to support their ideas with textual evidence. Discussions became productive rather than painful. Instead of vague generalizations met with awkward silence, students could point to specific scenes and quote dialogue to support their ideas. We could spend our valuable discussion time building on students’ comprehension rather than establishing it.

Teacher Quality of Life

Grading these quizzes also became much more manageable. We could grade them in minutes instead of spending over an hour agonizing over subjective point values. Our time and energy could be spent on more important things, like figuring out how best to hone our students’ literary analysis skills in discussion.

Once our students knew they’d be held accountable for basic comprehension, more of them read. It wasn’t all of them, and that’s okay—we can’t win every battle.

Practical Implementation: Making This Work in Your Classroom

If you’re looking to improve your approach to the reading quiz in your classroom, here are some practical considerations that will increase your chances of success.

Start With Your Goals

Before doing anything else, clarify two things in your mind: what students need to know before discussion and what you will teach them during discussion. Keep the reading quiz focused on the first category only.

Create or Curate Your Questions

You can certainly write your own comprehension questions, though this requires a time investment upfront. Save time (and energy) by collaborating with your PLC to share question-writing or use existing test banks or question sets.

Test Your Questions

No matter which approach you choose, have a colleague or teaching partner review your questions for fairness and clarity. Look for ambiguous wording or questions that could have multiple correct answers. Make sure the questions ask for what you actually want to know.

Be Consistent

Make the reading quiz part of your routine so that students know when to expect them, and keep the format consistent so students know how to prepare and can read with purpose.

Using Test Banks for Reading Accountability

Creating your own reading quiz has its benefits, but writing good comprehension questions takes time and expertise. Curating questions from a test bank allows you to focus on teaching instead, and you can still customize the questions to fit your needs and pacing.

A couple of things to consider as you’re evaluating whether a test bank will work for your purposes:

• Look for questions that focus on key plot events, not obscure details.
• Check that questions are clearly worded and edit if they’re not.
• Ensure flexibility: can you edit the questions for clarity and use them in different combinations? This will allow you to get the most use out of the test bank.
• Verify that the answer keys are accurate. We’ve encountered quite a few inaccurate quizzes over the years—it will save you time regrading if you notice from the outset.

You can see our approach in action with our test bank for The Hunger Games. It includes 250 questions: 50 character and quotation identification, 200 reading comprehension, and a few literary device application questions. Questions are grouped by chapters (7–12 per grouping) for flexible use.

Pull questions for smaller quizzes throughout reading, create different versions for different classes, or use them for a final exam. The wide range gives you flexibility—we even based our digital review games on these questions.

We have a similar test bank resource for Romeo and Juliet, broken up by act rather than chapter groupings.

Conclusion: The Reading Quiz That Actually Works

We have plenty of things we’d like to apologize to our early students for, and our initial approach to the reading quiz is at the top of that list.

Thankfully, we did finally learn a valuable lesson: use a reading quiz to test what students can know from their initial reading, not what you’ll teach them during discussion. Adopting this approach helped us move from quizzes where half the class failed to quizzes where most students earned As and Bs. Our discussions improved, and the objective grading was fast and fair. It’s important to be practical: our short-answer quizzes tried to deter every non-reader, but that’s a road to burnout. Allow the reading quiz to be what it is: accountability for basic comprehension. You and your students will benefit.

Once you have reading accountability in place, the next challenge is helping students prepare for meaningful discussion—check out our approach to guided reading questions that works alongside these comprehension quizzes.