A math quiz works in a middle school classroom when it reviews one thing well. Pick the skill you want back in their heads, write 20 to 25 questions where most of the class can answer the first two thirds, put them in teams, and never take points away. That is the whole method. The rest of this guide is how to do each part without spending your Sunday on it.
Below you will find 25 questions for grades 6 to 8 you can lift straight into your lesson, a scoring system that keeps the last-place team playing, and a 45-minute run sheet.
Pick a format: board or rapid fire
A Jeopardy-style board lets teams pick a category and a point value. It is the better choice for review, because the categories are the topics and you can see which squares the class avoids. That avoidance is your data.
Build this board in about ten minutes, then host it from your phone with the grid on the projector.
Make a Jeopardy boardRapid fire multiple choice suits warm-ups and end of term. Everyone answers at the same time, so nobody sits idle. If you cannot decide, build the board: choice is most of what makes a quiz feel like a game instead of a worksheet read aloud.
The 60/30/10 rule for difficulty
If this is a review quiz, keep every question inside the unit you taught. A general maths mix feels great in the room and tells you nothing about who understood dividing fractions. Then split the questions like this:
- 60% every student can answer with the method you taught. This is not padding. It is the reason the whole class stays in it.
- 30% that stretch, needing two steps or a conversion.
- 10% that only the strongest team gets, and that is fine, as long as they are worth the most points.
Most teachers get this backwards and write a quiz where the median question is hard. What happens next is predictable: two tables answer everything, the rest go quiet by question six, and you spend the last twenty minutes managing behaviour instead of maths.
Put the easy questions early
Order matters as much as ratio. Open with three questions almost everyone gets right. A team that has scored in the first two minutes will still be trying at minute thirty.
Write questions that test one idea
A good quiz question has exactly one reason a student can get it wrong. If a question can fail on either the arithmetic or the reading, you learn nothing from a wrong answer.
| Weak question | Why it fails | Better |
|---|---|---|
| A shop sells 3 apples for $1.20 and Maya buys 7 while her sister buys 5. What do they pay together? | Two skills plus a reading comprehension test stacked in one question | What is the cost of 7 apples if 3 apples cost $1.20? |
| Solve: 2x + 3 = 11 and check your answer | The check is unassessable when the answer is read out loud | Solve: 2x + 3 = 11 |
| What is 15% of 60, rounded to the nearest whole number? | The rounding clause is noise, the answer is already whole | What is 15% of 60? |
Two more rules that save you in the room:
- Every answer must be sayable. "3/4" works. "The graph shifts two units left" does not, when six teams are shouting.
- Keep it under two sentences. Long word problems belong in written work. Out loud, they lose the room.
- Write the answer down as you write the question. Half of all quiz disasters are a question the teacher cannot immediately answer.
25 ready-made questions for grades 6 to 8
Use these as they are, or swap the numbers to match your unit. They are ordered by difficulty, which maps onto the 60/30/10 split above.
Warm-up round
Five questions almost every student should get. Worth 100 points each.
- 100
What is 3/4 as a percentage?
Answer: 75%
- 100
Round 4.68 to the nearest tenth.
Answer: 4.7
- 100
What is 2 to the power of 5?
Answer: 32
- 100
A rectangle measures 7 cm by 4 cm. What is its area?
Answer: 28 cm²
- 100
What is the median of 3, 9, 4, 7 and 5?
Answer: 5
Core round
The body of the quiz: one method, two steps at most. Worth 200 to 300 points.
- 200
Solve: 3x + 5 = 20
Answer: x = 5
- 200
What is 20% of 45?
Answer: 9
- 200
Simplify the ratio 18:24.
Answer: 3:4
- 200
A triangle has angles of 40° and 75°. What is the third angle?
Answer: 65°
- 200
What is -7 + 12 - 5?
Answer: 0
- 300
What is 2/3 + 1/6?
Answer: 5/6
- 300
A shirt costs $25 and is discounted by 30%. What is the new price?
Answer: $17.50
- 300
A square has an area of 36 cm². What is its perimeter?
Answer: 24 cm
- 300
What is the mean of 12, 15, 9 and 8?
Answer: 11
- 200
What is 0.25 × 80?
Answer: 20
- 300
What is 6 + 2 × (5 - 1)?
Answer: 14
- 300
Write 3/8 as a decimal.
Answer: 0.375
Challenge round
Multi-step and reversed questions. Worth 400 to 500 points, and worth wagering on.
- 400
A recipe for 4 people uses 300 g of flour. How much flour for 10 people?
Answer: 750 g
- 400
Solve: 5(x - 2) = 35
Answer: x = 9
- 400
What is the probability of rolling a number greater than 4 on a fair six-sided die?
Answer: 1/3
- 400
What is the volume of a cube with edges of 4 cm?
Answer: 64 cm³
- 500
A jacket costs $80 after a 20% discount. What was the original price?
Answer: $100
- 500
What is the square root of 3² + 4²?
Answer: 5
- 500
Two angles are supplementary and one is three times the other. What are they?
Answer: 45° and 135°
- 400
A car travels 150 km in 2.5 hours. What is its average speed?
Answer: 60 km/h
Scoring that keeps the whole class playing
Three rules, and they matter more than the questions:
Never subtract points. Negative marking teaches students that the safe move is silence. You want guesses, because a wrong guess out loud is a teaching moment you did not have to create.
Score by team, not by student. Teams of three or four. Rotate who writes the answer so one student cannot do all the work.
Weight the end. Put a wager round last, where teams bet up to their current score before seeing the question. The last-place team can bet everything, the leaders play it safe, and the room stays loud until the final answer instead of emptying out at question fifteen.
Two things to get right while you run it: pause after each question so teams have to commit before the answer, because that argument is the learning, and keep the score somewhere everyone can see. A score in your notebook does not exist to them.
Cap the leader's wager
If the top team can double an already large lead, the wager round changes nothing. Cap wagers at, say, 500 points for whoever is leading. Nobody has ever complained about this rule mid-game.
Running it inside a 45-minute lesson
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 0 to 4 min | Split into teams, name the teams, write names on the board |
| 4 to 8 min | Warm-up round, five questions, fast pace, no discussion |
| 8 to 25 min | Core round, 12 questions, 30 seconds of team talk each |
| 25 to 35 min | Challenge round, 8 questions, one minute each |
| 35 to 41 min | Wager round: one question, teams bet first |
| 41 to 45 min | Final scores, and reteach the two questions most teams missed |
That last four minutes is the whole reason to run a quiz instead of a worksheet. You now know exactly which two methods to go over, and the class actually wants to hear the answer.
Run it live instead of reading from a sheet
Everything above works on paper. It works better when the board is on the projector, teams answer from a phone or a shared tablet, and the scores update themselves so you are not scorekeeper and host at once. That is what PardyTime does: build the board once, hit host, students join with a code and need no accounts. You can also start from someone else's quiz in the public library and change the numbers to match your unit. Everything above works on paper. It works better when the board is on the projector, teams answer from their phones or a shared tablet, and the scores update themselves so you are not the scorekeeper and the host at once.
That is what PardyTime does: build the board once, hit host, students join with a code, no accounts and no downloads on their side. You can also start from someone else's quiz in the public library and change the numbers to match your unit, which takes about ten minutes.