- Sortable quizzes ask you to drag items into the correct category or group
- No timer - scoring is based on how many items you categorized correctly
- Start with items you are certain about, use them to anchor the uncertain ones
- Great for classification, grouping, matching, and taxonomy challenges
What is a Sortable quiz?
A Sortable quiz presents a set of items and two or more categories. Your task is to drag each item into the correct group. Unlike Order quizzes where you arrange items in a sequence, Sortable quizzes ask you to classify items into buckets - which country is in which continent, which player belongs to which team, which chemical element belongs to which group. Browse Sortable quizzes to find classification challenges across all categories.
How to play a Sortable quiz - step by step
- Open a Sortable quiz and click Play Quiz.
- A set of items and a set of category buckets appear on screen. The quiz explains the classification rule - for example, "Sort these countries into their continent" or "Group these songs by the decade they were released".
- Drag each item from the unsorted pile into the bucket you think it belongs to.
- Rearrange items between buckets as many times as you like before submitting.
- Click Submit when you are satisfied with your groupings.
- The quiz reveals the correct categories and your score for correctly grouped items.
How is scoring calculated?
Sortable quizzes are untimed - scoring is purely based on accuracy. Each item placed in the correct category earns points. Misplaced items score zero. There is no partial credit within a category - an item is either in the right bucket or it is not. See How Quiz Scoring Works and XP and Points for how your performance translates to rewards.
Strategy for Sortable quizzes
- Sort your certainties first - go through all items and move the ones you are 100% sure about. This reduces the unsorted pile and may give you visual context clues about the remaining uncertain items.
- Use process of elimination - if you know an item does not belong in three of four categories, put it in the fourth. Elimination often resolves what pure knowledge cannot.
- Look for outliers - most items in a Sortable quiz are in the majority category. Identifying which items are the exceptions (and why) is often the key to a high score.
- Check bucket sizes - if the quiz has equal-sized categories, you can use the running count of items per bucket to catch obvious misplacements before submitting.
Sortable vs Order quizzes
Both Sortable and Order quizzes use drag-and-drop and have no timer. The key difference: Order asks you to create a sequence (first to last), while Sortable asks you to assign items to categories (which group does this belong to?). Many topics suit one format better than the other - timelines suit Order, classification suits Sortable. See the Quiz Formats guide for the full comparison across all nine types.
What topics work best as Sortable quizzes?
- Geography - countries by continent, rivers by country, capitals by region
- Science - elements by group, species by kingdom, planets by type
- Sports - players by club, clubs by league, events by sport
- History - inventions by century, leaders by country, battles by war
- Music - songs by artist, albums by decade, genres by era
- Language - words by language of origin, grammar categories