How to AI-Generate Assessment Questions from an Online Article, Website, or URL (Tutorial)

Maybe you found an article, paper, textbook, pdf, report, or any text-based resource online and want your quiz, assignment, homework, classwork, or any type of assessment or questions to be based on it.

You have multiple ways to do so. In this article, we will discuss three methods, ranked in order of effectiveness.

1. Create questions from URLs - using Monsha

This is the easiest, quickest, and smartest way—and it's free! Monsha for question creation is great because it reads external URLs for you and handles the structuring of the questions and overall assessments, so you don't have to worry about writing prompts or all the details.

You can also use a file to base your questions on, or pull in a YouTube video as sources for your assessment.

You can include diverse question types in your quiz or assessment, with the option to align them with specific standards. Plus, you can export it in the platform or format that works best for you, including Google Forms.

Here's how to do it:

1. Head over to Monsha and sign up or log in—it takes just two clicks!

2. Once you're in, you'll see a list of resources to create — including presentations, worksheets and reading comprehension questions. Choose Questions.

3. You'll be taken to the assessment creation page. Here, you can assign your assessment to a course, unit, and lesson. This step is optional, but we recommend doing it to keep your resources organized and make the most of Monsha's ability to plan your entire course or subject into units and lessons. But feel free to skip it now—you can always attach or detach your resources from a course later.

4. Next, choose what you want your questions to be based on. You can add a topic, paste a URL, use an article or YouTube video, upload a file or image, or even base it on a resource you've created before in Monsha. You can also combine multiple options if needed.

For this tutorial, we'll select A link from internet.

‍5. Paste the link directly into the field. Make sure the link can be crawled or indexed by bots. Meaning — if the URL can show up in Google search results, Monsha can access it too. Monsha (and ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot) currently can't read Google Docs or Slides.

6. If you didn't assign a course in the earlier step, you'll need to select the grade level and language in this step.

7. Finally, select the question-types you want to include in your quiz or assessment. Select only the ones you need and in your desired order. Currently, the available options are:

✅ Essential Questions
✅ Multiple Choice Questions
✅ Fill in the blank questions
✅ True/False questions
✅ Short answer questions
✅ Open-ended prompts

Feel free to also include any additional instructions you might have.

8. Optionally, you can assign a DOK level, Bloom's Taxonomy level, or Lexile reading level to adapt your questions.

9. Click Generate, and your assessment will be ready in seconds!

But there's even more power in your hands! Once you generate the assessment, you can:

1. Edit it as much as you like with Monsha's powerful editor, which supports rich content like tables, code, images, equations, and almost anything!
2. Re-generate the content with just one click if it's not quite what you were looking for.
3. Differentiate the questions based on grade level, language, DOK level, Lexile reading level, or Bloom's taxonomy.
4. Export it as a Google Forms quiz, or PDF, Google Doc, and other formats.
5. Create additional resources (like a worksheet, lesson plan, presentation, or study materials) based on the questions you just made.

You can always access your assessment later from your Monsha account.

Easy, right? Now, let's move on to alternative methods.

2. Create questions from URLs - using ChatGPT-4o

For this to work, you'll need access to the ChatGPT-4o model because GPT-3.5 can't read external links, and GPT-4 can be hit or miss.

Let's create some MCQ for example. Here's a step-by-step guide:

1. Sign in to your ChatGPT console and make sure you've selected the GPT-4o model.
2. Start prompting with something like this:

You are an expert teacher, skilled in producing detailed, authentic, and correct student assessments. Create 5 multiple choice questions appropriate for grade 10 based on the content of this URL: \\[insert your URL]

3. You might want to include answers and explanations:

Can you provide an answer key for the teacher under each question. Explain the answers in one sentence.

4. You can tweak it for your students. Maybe you want more questions, different difficulty levels, or a varied number of options in your MCQs.

Make the questions appropriate for grade 8 students. Add 3 more questions. Different questions will have different numbers of options.

5. Additionally you can ask ChatGPT to find educational videos or resources or create study plans for the students to prepare for the assessment:

  Can you search the internet for some additional educational videos and articles on these questions so that students can use them to prepare for the assessment?

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You can reduce the number of follow-ups though by using a more comprehensive, structured prompt for different question-types.

3. Create lesson plan from URLs - using ChatGPT 3.5 or ChatGPT 4

If you don't have access to ChatGPT 4o but still want to use ChatGPT, or somehow even ChatGPT 4o can't read your URL, here's a workaround:

1. Copy the website content into a document of your choice (e.g., Microsoft Word or Google Docs).
2. Split the long document into manageable sections.
3. Use ChatGPT to summarize each section separately.
4. Combine the summaries of each section.
5. Summarize the combined summaries to create a more concise overview.
6. Repeat this process recursively until you have a summary that covers the entire document.
   This article demonstrates the steps of summarizing long documents using ChatGPT.
7. Now ask ChatGPT to generate questions based on the final summary. For this you can follow the prompting steps in Method 2.

Feel free to try both of these methods and see what works best for your workflow. Pretty sure you'll find Monsha to be the ideal choice—not because we're biased, but because we designed Monsha to give teachers an easy, iterative, and super-quick way to create just-right resources. Give it a go!