Introduction to Question Banks
A question bank is a reusable collection of questions. You build banks once, then link them into as many online exercises and tests as you need. This article explains the model before you start creating them.
Where question banks live
Question Bank sits under Learning → Question Bank in the left-hand menu.
Why banks instead of writing questions into a test
In Edmingle, an online exercise never holds questions directly. Questions always live in a question bank, and the exercise points at the bank. That gives you three things:
- Reuse: the same bank can power a practice quiz, a mid-term, and a final.
- One place to fix things: correct a typo or a wrong answer key in the bank and every exercise using it is corrected.
- Randomization: an exercise can pull a different random subset of a bank for every learner.
[!Important] Linking is a live reference, not a copy. Any change you make to a question bank is reflected in every exercise it is linked to. Editing a question changes it everywhere, and deleting a question removes it everywhere. Treat a widely linked bank with care.
How a bank is organized
A question bank is flat: it has no chapters or sub-sections inside it. Instead, each bank is labelled with a taxonomy that you set once, at bank level:
| Attribute | What it is |
|---|---|
| Exam | The top-level grouping, for example "NEET" or "Semester 1" |
| Subject | Sits under an exam, for example "Physics" |
| Topic | Sits under a subject, for example "Thermodynamics" |
| Difficulty | Easy, Medium, or Hard for the bank as a whole |
Exam, Subject, and Topic are dependent: you pick an exam before a subject, and a subject before a topic. You can create new ones as you go by typing a name that does not exist yet.
Because a bank carries a single difficulty and a single topic, keep banks narrow. "Physics / Thermodynamics / Medium" as one bank is far more useful than one giant "Physics" bank, because narrow banks let you mix and match precisely when you build a paper.
How banks and exercises fit together
The structure of an online exercise is:
Online Exercise
└── Section (what learners see as a section on the question paper)
├── Question Bank A (use all, or N at random, or a manual selection)
└── Question Bank B
- A section is created inside the exercise and is what appears on the question paper.
- Each section can hold one or more linked banks.
- For each linked bank you decide how many of its questions to use and whether they are picked automatically or by you.
The question bank name is only visible to you. Learners see the section name on the question paper, not the bank names behind it.
Because you cannot filter a random pull by difficulty or topic, the way to build a mixed paper is to create separate banks (one per difficulty or topic) and link several of them into the same section.
Marks live on the question
Each question carries its own Marks and Negative Marks, set in the bank. These cannot be overridden from the exercise. If the same question needs to be worth a different amount in a different test, it needs to be a separate question in a separate bank.
Who can do what
| Action | Access needed |
|---|---|
| View banks and questions, export to CSV | Question bank read access |
| Create and edit banks, add questions, import, generate with AI, link banks to exercises | Question bank write access |
| Delete a bank or a question, remove a bank from a section | Question bank delete access |
Admins and instructors have access by default.
What's next
Start with Creating a Question Bank.