Best Respondus Test Maker Options for Faculty

The best Respondus test maker setup for most faculty is Respondus 4.0 itself for publishing, fed by a question source that matches what you start with. If you adopted a participating textbook, the Respondus Test Bank Network gives you publisher questions at no charge. If you already wrote the exam in Word, the campus formatting guide and a careful import are enough. If the exam does not exist yet and the material is a recorded lecture, a generator such as the VidQuiz Respondus question format generator writes the questions and exports a file Respondus imports on the first try.

Respondus 4.0 is a Windows authoring tool, licensed campus-wide from $1,695 a year by student FTE or as a single-user license. It holds, edits, prints and publishes questions to Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace and Moodle. What it does not do is write them, and that is the part of the job this comparison is about.

Respondus test maker options compared

Option	Where the questions come from	Writes new questions?	Cost	Best for
Respondus 4.0 on its own	Whatever you type into its editor or import	No	Campus-wide license from $1,695 a year, or a single-user license with no published price	Editing and publishing an exam you already have
Respondus Test Bank Network	Publisher test banks for participating textbooks	No, you pick from an existing bank	Free to instructors who adopt a participating textbook	Courses taught from a big publisher textbook
Word file plus the campus formatting guide	You write every item	You do	No software cost beyond Word	Short quizzes and exams you reuse each term
A general AI chatbot	Text you paste into a prompt	Yes, from pasted text	Your chatbot subscription	One-off drafts you will check line by line
VidQuiz	A YouTube link, a lecture recording with its transcript, or up to 60,000 characters of notes	Yes, with three plausible wrong answers, an explanation and a timestamp per item	A one-time demo of three quizzes, then from $49 a month or $24 a month billed annually	Exams built from recorded lectures and course videos

Only two rows produce questions you did not write yourself. The Test Bank Network gives you someone else's questions on someone else's textbook. A generator gives you questions on your own lecture, which is the material your students actually sat through.

Which Respondus test maker is best for faculty?

Decide by what is on your desk today, not by feature lists.

You teach from a major publisher textbook. Check the Test Bank Network first. Respondus says those banks are free to instructors who adopt a participating textbook, and they arrive already in Respondus format. One college notes the access request can take several days, so ask before the week you need it. The limit is fit: a publisher bank tests the chapter, not what you emphasized in class.

You already wrote the exam in Word. You do not need anything new. Follow your campus Respondus formatting guide, turn off Word auto numbering, star each correct answer with no space before the letter, and use Import Questions. Most failures come from hidden Word numbering, and the guides all say the same thing about it.

The exam has to be written from scratch, and the course is recorded. This is the case nothing in the Respondus box covers. Writing forty questions with believable distractors from a 50 minute lecture is most of an evening. VidQuiz reads a YouTube link directly, or a Panopto, Kaltura, Zoom or Teams recording with the transcript the platform already produced, and drafts the items. You edit the draft, press Respondus on the export bar, and import the .txt like any other file.

The source is a PDF chapter rather than a recording. VidQuiz does not read PDF files. A tool built to build questions straight from the PDF chapter is the better fit there.

How much does a Respondus test maker cost?

The Respondus 4.0 license is the fixed part. A campus-wide license runs from $1,695 a year for under 2,500 student FTE to $2,945 for 30,001 to 40,000, covers every faculty member, and renews on August 1. A single-user license can be bought online, but Respondus does not publish its price. Our Respondus 4 pricing breakdown has the full tier table.

The question source is the variable part. The Test Bank Network costs nothing if your textbook participates. Word costs nothing but your time. VidQuiz starts at $49 a month, or $288 a year billed annually, after a one-time demo of three quizzes on your own material. The fair comparison is not the license fee but the evening it takes to write a forty question exam by hand.

Can Respondus 4.0 generate questions automatically?

No. Respondus 4.0 has no feature that writes questions from your course material. It supports 15 question types, including calculated and algorithmic formats that vary the numbers in a math or science item, but every question still starts with an author. Algorithmic questions are the closest thing to generation in the app, and they only vary values inside a question you wrote.

Automatic question writing happens before Respondus, in a separate tool, and the file it hands over has to follow the Respondus standard format exactly. That is the part most chatbot workflows get wrong.

What should a Respondus file generator get right?

Respondus is forgiving in the preview and unforgiving on the details. A file from any generator, chatbot or colleague should pass these checks before you press Finish:

• Sequential numbers. Several campus guides warn that a skipped number stops the import. A generator that drops a weak question has to renumber the rest.
• The asterisk touching the letter. Write *b) with no space. An unmarked question imports with choice A as correct, and the only warning is in the preview window.
• True before False. A pair written the other way round imports as multiple choice.
• Feedback above the choices. General feedback lines start with ~ for a correct answer and @ for an incorrect one, and they go before the choices.
• Type lines where they belong. Essays need Type: E, multiple response needs Type: MR or Type: MA.

The VidQuiz exporter was written against those rules, and the Respondus question format generator page shows a sample file with each one in place. A chatbot can produce the same layout, but it does not run the preview, so check every block yourself.

Is there a Respondus test maker for Mac?

No. Respondus 4.0 runs on Windows only, which campus software pages state plainly. Mac faculty either use a campus lab or a Windows virtual machine, or skip Respondus and import straight into the learning system.

For that second route, the same VidQuiz quiz exports QTI 1.2 for Canvas and Brightspace, GIFT and Aiken for Moodle, and a tab delimited upload file for Blackboard, all from the browser. The Respondus 4.0 alternative page walks through each one.

Does Respondus 4.0 still work with Canvas?

Yes. The University of Missouri System notes that Respondus 4 version 4.1.0.02 or later publishes to Canvas New Quizzes as well as Classic Quizzes, and the Publish Wizard asks which one you want. Some older campus pages still say New Quizzes is unsupported, because they were written before that update. If yours does, run Help, Check for Update first.

The short version

Keep Respondus 4.0 for what it is good at: editing, printing and publishing to every major learning system from one place. Feed it from the Test Bank Network when your textbook participates, from your own Word file when the exam already exists, and from a generator when the exam has to be written from a recorded lecture. For that last case, paste the link into VidQuiz above, review the draft, and download the Respondus file with every answer starred and every explanation set as feedback.