How to Make a Quiz From Any Video to Test Yourself

Self-testing is one of the most consistently well-supported study techniques in the cognitive science literature, and yet almost nobody does it with video content, because writing your own quiz questions from a video feels like extra work on top of already having watched it. It's less work than it sounds like, and it's worth doing. Here's how.

Write questions from the transcript, right after each section

The easiest time to write a good question about a section is immediately after you've read or watched it, while you still remember what was actually said and what would be a fair test of it. Waiting until the end of a long video and trying to write questions from memory produces worse, vaguer questions; you'll default to "what did the speaker say about X" instead of something that actually tests understanding.

Mix question types on purpose

• •Recall questions ("What are the three stages the speaker describes?"): the easiest to write, useful for checking you retained the basic content.
• •Explain-why questions ("Why does the speaker say X causes Y?"): harder to write, and a much better test of whether you actually understood the reasoning, not just the conclusion.
• •Apply-it questions ("Given what was said about X, what would happen if..."): the hardest to write and the most valuable, because they test whether you can use the idea somewhere the video didn't explicitly cover.

A quiz made entirely of the first type feels productive but tests the shallowest kind of memory. Aim for a real mix; even two or three explain-why or apply-it questions scattered through an otherwise recall-heavy quiz meaningfully raises how useful the whole set is.

Write the explanation, not just the answer

A quiz you write for yourself is more useful with a one-line explanation attached to each answer, not just "correct" or "incorrect," but why, and ideally a timestamp back to where it was covered. When you get a question wrong weeks later, the explanation is what turns that miss into an actual correction instead of just a confirmation that you still don't know it.

Retake it, and pay attention to what keeps missing

A quiz taken once tells you what you didn't know at that moment; a quiz retaken a few days later tells you what you actually haven't learned yet, which is the more useful information. Keep a running note of which questions you miss more than once. Those are the specific gaps worth targeted review, rather than rewatching or rereading the whole video again from the top.