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Instructor Guide: Maintaining a Healthy and Functional Question Bank (Moodle 4.5)

Over time, your Question Bank can become cluttered, especially if you copy courses each term. A clean, organized Question Bank makes it easier to find questions, reuse content, and avoid issues when building quizzes.

Updated over a week ago

Best Practices for Question Bank Cleanup

Before you begin, keep these tips in mind:

  • Stay Organized: Arrange categories in a clear, logical structure so questions are easy to locate

  • Use a “Do Not Delete” or "Archive" Category: Temporarily move questions you want to keep (such as those used in quizzes)

  • Review Before Deleting: Questions currently used in quizzes cannot be deleted

  • Perform Regular Maintenance: Cleaning your Question Bank each term helps prevent clutter and performance issues

Important: Deleting questions cannot be undone. Make sure you no longer need them before proceeding.

How to Delete Several Categories Questions at Once:

When Should You Use This Method?

Use this process if you:

  • Have many unused categories

  • Want to delete multiple questions across several categories at once

  • Find your Question Bank difficult to manage

The Quick Idea

Instead of deleting questions one category at a time, you can:

  1. Group categories under one parent category

  2. Move any questions you want to keep

  3. Delete all remaining questions in bulk

  4. Remove the empty categories

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Open Your Question Bank

  • Go to your course

  • Click More (top menu)

  • Select Question bank

Arrow pointing to the question bank in the More dropdown menu

Step 2: Go to Categories

  • Use the dropdown menu near the top-left

  • Select Categories

Categories selected in the dropdown menu

Step 3: Create Temporary Categories

Create categories to help organize your cleanup:

  • Click Add category

  • Create one called: “Categories to Purge” or something similar

  • Create another called: “Do Not Delete” or “Archive” or something similar

Screenshot of the Add category button

Step 4: Group Categories for Cleanup

  • Move the categories you want to clean up under Categories to Purge

  • You can drag and drop categories to nest them

Before grouping:

Categories shown in line vertically with each other, indicating that there is no parent/child relationship between any of these categories.

After grouping:
​

Screenshot of question bank categories. All the categories under the top category are slightly indented in, indicating they are children of the top parent category.

Step 5: View All Questions

  • Click the Categories to Purge category

  • Check:

    • Also show questions from subcategories

    • Also show old questions (if available)

  • Click Apply filter or Show all

Question bank filters set with "Also show questions from subcategories" and "show hidden questions" set to yes.

Step 6: Move Questions You Want to Keep

Before deleting, move any important questions:

  • Look for questions that:

    • Are used in quizzes

    • You may want to reuse later

    • Hidden questions

  • Select those questions

  • Scroll down to With selected… → Move to

  • Move them to the Do Not Delete category

Screenshot of two questions. The first is slightly grayed out indicating it is a hidden question. There is an error pointing to the usage column with the number 1 indicating that the question is used in a quiz.

Step 7: Delete Questions in Bulk

  • Stay in the Categories to Purge category

  • Select the checkbox at the top to select all remaining questions

  • Scroll down to With selected… → Delete

Arrow pointing to the first checkbox indicating it will select all questions underneath it.

Step 8: Confirm Deletion

  • Moodle will show a confirmation page

  • Questions marked with an asterisk (*) are still used in quizzes and cannot be deleted

Example of questions that are used in quizzes, indicated by the asterisk before the question.

If you see these:

  • Go back and move them to Do Not Delete

  • Then try deleting again

If everything looks correct:

  • Scroll down and click Delete

Screenshot of the delete button at the bottom of the page.

Step 9: Delete Empty Categories

  • Return to the Categories page

  • Categories should now show 0 questions

  • Click the three dots (⋮) next to a category

  • Select Delete

screenshot of the delete option under the three vertical dots dropdown to the left of a question.

Step 10: If Moodle asks you to move questions:

  • Select a destination category

  • Click Save in category

Example showing "The category 'Example Questions' contains 16 questions (some of which may be hidden questions or random questions that are still in use in a quiz). Please choose another category to move them to."

Step 11: Repeat step 9 for all remaining empty categories

Helpful Tips

  • Clean up your Question Bank at the start or end of each term

  • For large Question Banks, break the cleanup into manageable chunks by deleting categories in groups of approximately 500 questions or fewer at a time.

If you’re unsure about deleting questions or organizing your Question Bank, feel free to reach out. We’re happy to help.

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