How to Enable the Question Assistance for Candidates

Article verified for Release 15.1 on December 9, 2025

This article explains how to configure Question Assistance for test questions and how candidates can use hints, additional time, and other available assistance during the test-taking process.

Understanding Question Assistance

Question Assistance is an optional feature that provides candidates with predefined help while they are answering a question. Depending on the question type and its configuration, one or more assistance options can be made available to the candidate.

Question Assistance can include:

• Hint – displays additional information or a clue that can help the candidate answer the question.
• Additional time – adds the configured amount of time to the time available for answering the question.
• Minus one wrong answer – removes one incorrect answer option from the list of possible answers.

Each assistance option can have its own penalty value. If a candidate uses an assistance option that has a configured penalty, the penalty can affect the number of points earned for the question.

Availability

Question Assistance is available for supported question types. The available assistance options may vary depending on the question type.

Question Assistance can be configured for the following question types:

• Single choice.
• Multiple choice.
• True/False.
• Fill-in-the-blank.
• Matching.
• Open-ended.
• Ordering.

Note: If assistance is added to a question that supports branching, the branching option will automatically be disabled.

Enabling Question Assistance

To configure Question Assistance for a question:

1. Navigate to Tests > Question pools.
2. Select the question pool that contains the question you want to edit.
   
   
   
3. Open the Questions tab and select the question you want to configure.
4. Click Edit, then open or scroll to the Advanced settings section.
   
   
   
5. Under Assistance, configure one or more of the available assistance options:
   • Hint – enter the text that will be displayed to the candidate and define the penalty for using the hint.
   • Additional time – specify how much additional time will be given to the candidate and define the penalty for using it.
   • Minus one wrong answer – define the penalty that will be applied when the candidate uses this option.
6. Click Save to save the question configuration.
   
   
   

Important notes

• The penalty for each assistance option can be configured separately.
• The penalty value can be set to 0 if using the assistance should not reduce the candidate’s score.
• If branching is enabled for a question, adding assistance will automatically disable branching.
• Question Assistance must be configured individually for each question.
• The available assistance options may differ depending on the question type.

Using Question Assistance as a Candidate

When Question Assistance is configured for a question, the candidate can access the available assistance directly from the test-taking page.

The available options are displayed in the Helping hand section. The candidate can see which assistance options are available and the penalty associated with each option before choosing whether to use them.

From the candidate’s perspective, each assistance option works as follows:

• Hint – when the candidate chooses this option, the configured hint text is displayed on the question page. The candidate can then use this information when selecting or entering an answer.
• Additional time – when the candidate chooses this option, the configured amount of additional time is automatically added to the time available for answering the question.
• Minus one wrong answer – when the candidate chooses this option, the system automatically removes one incorrect answer from the available answer options. The candidate can then choose from the remaining answers.

Note: Assistance is optional. The candidate decides whether to use an available assistance option.

Understanding Assistance Penalties

The penalty configured for an assistance option is displayed to the candidate in the Helping hand section.

If the candidate uses an assistance option with a penalty and then answers the question correctly, the configured assistance penalty is deducted from the points earned for that question.

For example, if a question is worth 5 points and the Hint has a penalty of 1 point, a candidate who uses the Hint and then answers the question correctly will receive 4 points for that question.

If the assistance penalty is set to 0, using that assistance does not reduce the points awarded for a correct answer.

Question Assistance allows test managers to provide controlled support to candidates while clearly defining how using that support affects question scoring.

For more related instructional materials, please visit:

• How to Create a Single Choice Question.
• How to Configure Scoring Methods and Grading Options.