Mandatory vs. Critical Questions
Two independent checkboxes on every question control how it's drawn and how it's scored — here's what each one actually does.
This assumes you already know how to create a quiz and add questions to it.
The Two Checkboxes
Open any question in the quiz editor to find Mandatory and Critical next to its points field. They look similar, but they control completely different things.
| Checkbox | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Mandatory | Whether the question is always included when the quiz draws a random set of questions. |
| Critical | Whether the question counts toward a separate pass requirement, on top of the overall score threshold. |
Mandatory: Always in the Draw
Mandatory only matters when a quiz is in Exam mode and drawing questions randomly from a question bank (see Exam Mode). A mandatory question skips the random draw entirely and is always included in every participant's attempt — the remaining slots are then filled randomly from the rest of the bank.
On a quiz that isn't in exam mode, every question you've added is already shown to every participant, so Mandatory has no additional effect there.
Critical: A Separate Pass Gate
Critical questions are scored as their own group, in addition to the overall score. A quiz has a Critical requirement — a minimum percentage of critical questions the participant must get right (100% by default). If the drawn set includes any critical questions, the participant must clear both:
- The quiz's overall pass threshold, and
- The critical requirement among just the critical-flagged questions.
Failing either one means the attempt doesn't pass — even with a high overall score. This makes Critical useful for questions that represent a hard safety or compliance requirement, where getting the overall score right isn't enough on its own.
The Critical requirement percentage field lives in the Exam mode section of a quiz's Settings tab. The critical gate itself applies to any quiz that has a critical-flagged question in its answered set — not only quizzes in exam mode — so if you mark a question Critical on a non-exam quiz, the 100% default requirement still applies even though there's no visible field for it yet on that quiz.
What's Next
- Exam Mode — pass thresholds, time limits, and the critical requirement field
- The Learner Experience — how a "Not passed" result looks to a participant