Are you looking for the best online assessment software for WordPress courses?
This blog post can help.
One of the best ways to determine the effectiveness of your online teaching is through assessments. With the right tools, you can carry out a variety of assessments that will keep your students engaged and eager to learn more.
But finding the right online assessment software for your courses can be tough. There are a lot of options to choose from. How do you find the right one?
We've got you.
Keep reading to find the best tools to assess your students & provide maximum value in your courses.
Why Should You Assess Your Students?
Assessments offer a clear, measurable way to track your students’ progress.
They are also key for providing a valuable e-learning experience.
While the success of your course depends on the materials you use – and your expert online teaching skills – you also need to make sure your students are retaining the right information.
Online assessments help:
Measure learning outcomes
Increase student engagement & interaction with your course content
Offer more focused feedback, allowing your students to improve faster
Set a benchmark to compare overall student performance and find the parts of your course that need improvement
Identify your students’ individual strengths and weaknesses, and provide relevant feedback based on your findings
Support your students’ learning by providing different types of assessments (quizzes, essays, practical tasks, etc.)
What to Look for When Considering Online Assessment Software
If you’re looking for online assessment software for a WordPress course, your best bet is to purchase a WordPress learning management system (LMS) plugin.
These plugins are designed to help you create online courses and assess your students effectively.
When considering WordPress LMS plugins, be sure to evaluate the following:
Price: is the cost of this tool within your budget? Are there hidden costs?
Assessment types: what question types does the plugin offer? Can you set a variety of assessments or are you limited to basic assignments or quizzes?
Grading options: does the plugin have a points system?
WordPress compatibility: can you connect this plugin to an existing WordPress website?
Security: is this plugin updated regularly?
Integration with other tools: can you connect this plugin to other payment and marketing tools?
User-friendliness: is this tool easy to set up and use?
Scalability: can this plugin grow with your business?
With these requirements in mind, let’s dive in to the best WordPress LMS plugins, with assessment functionality, available.
Best Online Assessment Software for WordPress Courses (11 Picks)
This guide details the best online assessment software for WordPress courses. Most of these plugins can be used by WordPress users with varying technical skills — from beginners to advanced users.
1. Thrive Apprentice
Thrive Apprentice is the best LMS plugin for WordPress.
This plugin is user-friendly and provides you with everything you need to create a thriving online course business.
Thrive Apprentice features a drag-and-drop course builder, equipped with customizable templates, and focuses on helping you create high-quality, unlimited courses.
The beauty of this course builder is its live editing feature. You get to see every change you make to the front end of your online courses.
Thrive Apprentice also offers a variety of drip content settings, so you can create a release schedule for your lessons if you don’t want your students to access them all at once.
Other key features include detailed reports, custom certificates, Stripe integration, and more.
In terms of assessments, Thrive Apprentice provides four ways to test your students’ knowledge.
- Quiz Builder Assessment: Let your students take a WordPress quiz you built in Thrive Quiz Builder, our online quiz plugin.
- Assessment Upload: Requires your students to upload a file (PDF, PowerPoint, etc.)
- YouTube Link: Let your students submit a link to a YouTube video
- External Link to Assessment: Students can provide a link to anything— whether it's a file on their personal Google Drive, their own website, a wireframe for a mobile app, etc.
You can add Assessments to any part of your online course – after a specific lesson, at the end of a module, etc.
With these options, you can create a variety of effective assessments that can be taken online or offline and uploaded later.
Assessments can be set as prerequisites for specific lessons, requiring students to pass them before they can continue with your course.
Thrive Apprentice Assessments also include automatic grading, based on quiz results.
But, you’ll need to purchase Thrive Quiz Builder to enable this feature (and also create quizzes).
You can buy Thrive Apprentice as an individual product or as a part of our WordPress plugin bundle, Thrive Suite.
If you purchase Thrive Suite, you also get access to Thrive Quiz Builder.
2. MemberPress
MemberPress is a powerful WordPress membership plugin used by small businesses and course creators all over the world.
If you want to create a membership site, online course platform, or a combination of both – this is the plugin for you.
The MemberPress Courses add-on helps you build impactful online courses and also includes quiz functionality to assess your students.
Quiz types include multiple choice, multi-select, true/false, short answer, and essay.
You can also set rules for quiz completion. For example, if you set a quiz question as “required” and the student doesn’t answer it, a notification will pop up informing them that they must answer the question to complete the quiz.
MemberPress supports multiple payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net.
Pricing starts from $179.50 per year, for their Basic Plan. But if you want access to unlimited quizzes, certificates, and other course features, you need to pay for their Plus plan.
This plugin provides all the standard features required for building solid online courses and integrates with a variety of payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, etc.
You don’t need a WooCommerce theme to use Sensei LMS – most popular WordPress themes work well with this plugin.
This plugin also offers assessment functionality in the form of quizzes. Quiz questions can be multiple choice, true/false, gap-fill, open-ended, and more.
You can enable a “Pass Required” function to ensure learners achieve a specific grade before they can advance to the next lesson.
Sensei can also display quizzes at random — which is key if you want your courses to include spot tests.
Compared to other LMS plugins listed in this guide, Sensei’s features come across as quite basic. But if you’re a WooCommerce store owner who wants to add a couple of simple courses to their available products, this could be the plugin for you.
Sensei LMS has a free version, with basic course features, and a pro version that starts at $15 per month, billed annually.
4. MemberMouse
MemberMouse is a powerful membership plugin for WordPress. In addition to its advanced membership features, this plugin also includes a learning management system known as Courses for MemberMouse.
Courses for MemberMouse allows you to create online courses with ease. It also includes quiz functionality to help you assess your students effectively.
This plugin offers 5 quiz question types:
Multiple choice
Multiple answers
True or False
Short answer questions
Essay questions
Courses for MemberMouse also allows you to weight questions based on their complexity. For example, a correct answer to an essay question can be worth more points than a response to a multiple-choice question.
This plugin also allows you to provide feedback for incorrect answers if you so wish. Quizzes can be placed at any part of a course – before a lesson, after a lesson, at the end of a module, etc.
MemberMouse integrates with popular payment gateways and email marketing services.
Pricing for this plugin starts at $199.50 per year for the Basic Plan. But for quiz functionality, you’ll have to purchase a higher-tiered plan, starting at $299.50 per year.
This plugin is designed to help you build a professional, online course platform & sell your first course in minutes (or hours).
LearnDash supports a variety of quiz types as part of their online courses, including multiple-choice, sorting, fill-in-the-blanks, and many more.
Quiz questions are created using a variation of Gutenberg (the WordPress editor), meaning they can feature any content and media types supported by standard WordPress pages.
Navigating the LearnDash quiz builder is also quite confusing. You’ll need to set aside some time to get familiar with the different steps and settings in the WordPress Editor.
But, confusing interface aside, LearnDash has a powerful quiz engine built into its course-building platform, making it much easier for you to assess your students.
Pricing for LearnDash starts at $199 per year, for one site.
Tutor LMS has a free plugin with basic features and a premium plan that offers advanced features like certificates, reports, drip content, and more.
This plugin also has a powerful quiz builder to help you assess your students’ progress. The Tutor LMS quiz builder features ten question types – true/false, single choice, fill-in-the-blanks, matching, ordering, image answering, open-ended, and more.
Like most LMS plugins in this list, Tutor LMS also lets you make passing a quiz mandatory to access subsequent course content.
This plugin integrates with most checkout tools including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and more. You can also connect this plugin to a variety of email marketing, social media, page builder tools, and popular plugins like bbpress and BuddyPress.
Pricing for Tutor LMS’ premium plans starts at $199 per year.
7. LearnPress
LearnPress is a WordPress LMS plugin known for its simplicity.
LearnPress’s core plugin is free and allows you to create courses and quizzes, but you’ll need to pay for premium add-ons, in the form of the LearnPress
PRO Bundle, to access advanced course-building features like drip content, assignments, and a frontend editor.
You’ll find that a lot of these add-ons are built-in features in more premium LMS plugins like Thrive Apprentice, MemberPress, and LearnDash.
The cost of a LearnPress PRO bundle is $299.
8. Lifter LMS
Lifter LMS is a popular WordPress LMS plugin designed to help you create and sell your online courses quickly.
Compared to some of the other providers listed in this guide, LifterLMS is a simpler, but less intuitive LMS tool.
But this plugin does offer a variety of course-building and monetization tools to help you create a successful course business.
LifterLMS supports multiple choice quizzes as part of their online courses, and you can add them to any lesson or use them to lock progress until completed.
But if you want to add a more advanced quiz to your courses in LifterLMS, you’ll have to pay for the highest LifterLMS
pricing tier costing $1,200 per year – which is extremely inconvenient for business owners who are building on a budget.
This premium tier also gives you access to MailChimp and ConvertKit integration.
9. WP Courseware
WP Courseware is a simple WordPress LMS plugin.
This plugin features a drag-and-drop course builder, drip content, and email notifications.
In terms of assessing your students, WP Courseware includes advanced question types, question bank to store questions and answers, timers, retake limits, and surveys. Every course you create also has a grade book with detailed quiz records for each student, allowing you to easily monitor your students’ progress.
WP Courseware integrates with a variety of eCommerce plugins, including WooCommerce.
Pricing starts at $159 per year, for a 2 site license.
10. Namaste! LMS
Namaste! LMS is another WordPress LMS plugin to consider.
Namaste! LMS offers a free plugin that allows you to build a decent online course. For more design & customization options, you’ll need to purchase the premium plugin.
To assess our students, you can use the plugin’s built-in Assignments feature, or use a third-party plugin like Watu or WatuPRO to create online exams.
Pricing for a premium version of this plugin starts at $67. All tiers are a one-time payment.
11. MasterStudy LMS
MasterStudy LMS is a WordPress LMS plugin that comes with a lot of features to help you create your online course business.
This plugin is designed to work with most WordPress themes, and also comes with its own free starter theme.
In terms of assessing students, MasterStudy offers an advanced quiz builder that includes eight question types – single choice, multi-choice, item match, image matching, image choice, fill-the-gap, and more. You can also set real-time questions and answers and include countdown timers.
Essay-type assessments, or file uploads, can be done through the plugin’s course assignments feature. However, you’ll need to purchase a premium plan to unlock all these features.
Pricing starts at $79 per year for a single-site license.
Next Steps: Create Your First Assessment
By now, you should have found the right online assessment tool for your WordPress courses.
If you picked Thrive Apprentice, you can start building your first assessment in minutes.
After you’ve installed Thrive Apprentice, and created your first course, click the “Courses” tab in your dashboard.
Click "Assessments" and choose an assessment type.
Follow the instructions, configure your grading and main assessment settings, and save your settings.
Your assessment will appear in the course-builder and can be moved around.
FAQs: Best Online Assessment Software for WordPress Courses
Q: What is the best online course plugin for WordPress?
A: Thrive Apprentice is the best online course plugin. This plugin includes all the features you need to build a successful course platform – a drag-and-drop builder, assessment functionality, Stripe integration, drip content, reporting, and more.
Q: Is WordPress good for online courses?
A: Yes, WordPress is more than ideal for online courses. With the help of plugins like Thrive Apprentice, MemberPress, and MemberMouse, users can easily create and sell courses.
WordPress offers flexibility, is customizable, and can integrate with various tools and platforms.
Q: What LMS plugin would you use to add courses to a WordPress site?
A: Thrive Apprentice, MemberPress, MemberMouse, and LearnDash are among the best WordPress LMS plugins we recommend.
Grow Your Online Course Business with Thrive Suite
Now that you’ve found the best online assessment software for WordPress courses, it’s time to focus on the rest of your online course business.
Here are four free tutorials to learn how to improve your courses and grow your online course business:
Your online courses are only as effective as the platform they’re hosted on. Thrive Apprentice helps you create a great online learning experience for your students.
Thrive Suite helps you create a thriving online course business.
But don’t take it from us.
Give Thrive Suite a try today and start creating online courses that bring in sales.
