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.AI

This is the easiest, quickest, and smartest way—and it’s free! Monsha for question creation is great because it reads external links and handles the structuring of the questions and overall assessments for you, so you don’t need to worry about writing prompts or anything else. Plus it can create many question-types: MCQ, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, open-ended prompt, among others.

Follow these steps:

1. Head 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. Choose Questions.

   

3. On the assessment creation page, you can assign your assessment to a course, unit, and lesson. This is optional, but we recommend it to keep things organized and make it easier to plan and maintain your entire course later. Again, this is optional at this point—you can always attach your resources to a course later if needed.

   

4. Now, choose what you want your questions to be based on. You can add a topic, paste a URL, use an article or YouTube video, or even base it on a resource (like a lesson plan, or a reading passage) you’ve created before on Monsha. In the context of this tutorial, A Link From the 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 haven’t assigned a course, select the grade level and language.

   

7. Choose the question-types you want to include in your quiz or assessment. Select only the ones you need and in your desired order.

   

8. Click Generate, and your assessment with desired question-types will be ready in seconds! It will look something like this:

   

You can either download it immediately or access it anytime later from your Monsha account. You can even create further resources (like a reading passage or vocab words) based on the questions you just created.

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?

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 all of these methods and see what works best for your workflow. Most likely, you’ll find Monsha to be the ideal choice—not because we’re biased, but because we designed Monsha like that—to offer teachers a better way of creating content. Give it a try!