This is a "landing page" of sorts. It shows you the questions you are in the progress of creating as well as questions you've previously submitted. Clicking on any of the entries will expand them and give you an overview of the data included. "In-Progress" questions will also include an "Edit" button which will take you to the question creation portal to allow you to continue working on them. "Submitted" questions are there for your records — you will still see a similar overview if you expand an individual list item but you will not be able to edit them.

If you're logging in for the first time those sections will be blank and you'll just see the "Submit New Question" button at the top.

New Questions

When creating a new question from scratch, you're asked to enter some personal information as well as the Domain, Competency, and Expectation of the question (more details on these categories can be found on the TExES CONTENTS page).

Note: these categories can still be edited after you create the question, they are just the bare minimum required to create and mark a question as in-progress.

Once all the fields are filled out and you click "Create Question", a blank question is created (it will now show up in your dashboard as in-progress), and the rest of the question creation features become available — they're roughly broken up into two sections:

Question Details

This section is relatively straightforward. You'll enter your question in the box labeled "Question" and then indicate whether or not the question will include any media. More on media in a bit, but an important note is that a question can take both an image and audio, if desired.

Answer Details

This section is a bit more involved, but each step is straightforward. The idea is to create a set of four responses, one correct and three distractors. The first distractor should feel right on first glance, to encourage the test-taker to think about their answer. The second distractor should reward a knowledgeable test-taker by being relatively easy to eliminate if they've done some studying on the subject. The final distractor should be obviously incorrect to anyone who has spent any time with the material.

At the top of the answer section, you have the option to indicate whether the answers should have media. Another important note here: all answers will have the option of including either an image or audio (if you select image, all answers will have the option to include an image).

Each response has its corresponding tab, marked "Correct", "First Distractor", "Second Distractor", and "Third Distractor" within each tab are the same prompts:

1. Enter the applicable response
2. Indicate why the answer is either correct or incorrect. It is important to be thorough here, as this will be shown to test-takers to help them understand their test results.
3. Provide the relevant media (if selected at the top)

Images

Image files are pretty simple. All the usual file types are supported (png, jpeg, etc.). The only restriction is that it should be 3mb or less. This is just to keep the application performant and shouldn't hinder any reasonable image upload. If your file is larger than 3mb it's likely that either something went wrong or that it's just a much higher resolution image than is needed for our purposes.

Tip: An easy way to remedy this is to take a screenshot of the image at whatever size you need and upload that — at a 1440p (or "2k", high quality standard for modern computers) resolution a full-sized screenshot still runs well under 3mb on average.

Audio

Audio is a bit more restrictive. Again, to keep things performant and file-sizes low, we're requiring files to be mp3 formatted and no longer than 30 seconds. There are plenty of free converters online (including ours, available on the CONVERT MEDIA page), but mp3 is also a pretty standard export option within modern audio editing software (Audacity, Garageband, etc.).

This feature is a work in progress and will improve over time.

Since we're requesting that audio files be mp3 formatted, we've included an audio converter on this site. It's available here. It currently only converts audio files, but its features may be expanded in the future if necessary. These instructions are also on the converter page, but they're included here for your convenience.

1. Click on the box to select your audio file (or drag it over the outlined area). A preview of the audio will appear as well as instructions for the next step.
2. Once the "Convert" button appears, click it to start the process of converting your file to mp3.
3. When Conversion is complete, you'll have a chance to preview the converted file and download it.

Please note that this is currently only working on Chromium browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, etc.) as well as Firefox on Windows devices, it will not work properly if you're using Safari.

As this feature is not fully stable yet, we can also recommend using the conversion feature on the free VLC Media Player. After installing and launching VLC follow these steps to convert your audio file:

1. On the top left, click "Media"->"Convert / Save..."
2. In the popup window, Click "+ Add" and select your desired audio file, click "Convert / Save" (if prompted with options, select "Convert")
3. Under "Profile", select Audio - MP3
4. Next to "Destination file", click Browse and be sure to add ".mp3" to the filename.
5. Click Start and the window will disappear. It may take a minute or two for the file to appear, but you should end up with a properly converted mp3 file.