Logical question groups: keep your scenario-based questions together and in order

Designing an exam with scenarios, case studies, or reading passages almost always means several questions tied to the same content. How do you keep those questions together, in the right order, without risking them getting scattered by random ordering?

Logical question groups (what’s referred to in the literature as a testlet or an item set) let you bundle questions that need to stay together, while each one keeps its own content, scoring, and grading grid.

What is a logical question group?

A logical group brings together questions that share a common context: a scenario, a passage, a case study, or any other shared content. In Nexam, it works exactly the same way in a exam’s question management and in a question bank.

A logical group never merges anything. Each question keeps its own content, format, scoring, grading grid, answers, and settings.

Why group questions together

Whenever a scenario needs several questions, separating them during exam design or through random ordering breaks their coherence. A participant could end up seeing question 3 right after a passage they read for question 12.

This kind of grouping is a well-established practice in assessment, used to preserve the coherence of an exam built around scenarios or passages. Logical groups bring that same principle directly into Nexam’s question management.

How to create a logical group

Groups are created from the question management table.

1. Select at least two questions.
2. Use the create group action.
3. Give it a title and a color that make the related content easy to identify, such as the passage name or the skill being assessed.

If the selected questions aren’t already adjacent, Nexam automatically moves them to form a continuous block. The grouping takes precedence over their original position, and questions are renumbered accordingly.

Rules to know

To add a question to a different group, it must first be removed from its current group. Removing a question never deletes it from the exam.

Random ordering, without breaking the logic of your scenarios

Let’s take a concrete example. A scenario describes a new employee who makes a mistake in front of a client.

• The first question asks the participant to identify the problem in the situation.
• The second asks them to choose the best reaction to take in the moment.
• The third asks them to explain how to prevent the situation from happening again.

These three questions don’t just share a context, they build a line of reasoning.

Asking how to prevent the situation from recurring before even identifying the problem wouldn’t make sense.

That’s exactly what logical groups protect. With random ordering, the block of questions can be moved within the copy like any other content, but its internal order stays intact. Your scenario can appear at the beginning or the end of the exam depending on the participant, without ever presenting the solution before the problem it addresses. Questions that don’t belong to any group continue to be ordered normally.

What stays the same for the participant

During the exam, the participant never sees the logical group’s title or color: these are internal management tools, never displayed on the test-taking screen. They also stay invisible during live proctoring, grading, feedback, or reports. Each question is still handled separately, based on its own content and settings.

Learn more

Logical question groups fit directly into your exam design workflow. Find the full set of creation rules in our Help Center (Nexam login required).

Want to see these new options in action, or talk about your digital assessment needs? Schedule a demo with the Solution Nexam team →