Display a quiz without nbgrader

The display_quiz() function works standalone — you don’t need nbgrader to render an interactive quiz. This is useful for self-check exercises in a teaching notebook, slides, or a JupyterBook where no grading pipeline exists.

Inline question list

Pass a list of question dicts directly:

from nbgrader_jupyterquiz import display_quiz

questions = [
    {
        "type": "multiple_choice",
        "question": "Which planet is closest to the Sun?",
        "answers": [
            {"answer": "Mercury", "correct": True, "feedback": "Right!"},
            {"answer": "Venus",   "correct": False},
            {"answer": "Earth",   "correct": False},
        ],
    },
]
display_quiz(questions)

Run the cell — the quiz renders with green / red correctness feedback on click. No nbgrader, no sidecar, no autograder.

Loading from a JSON file

For longer quiz banks, keep the questions in a separate file:

display_quiz("warmup_questions.json")

The JSON file is a list of question objects in the same shape as the inline list above. Loading from a URL works too — pass any http(s)://... string.

Display options

A few options are commonly useful in standalone mode:

display_quiz(
    questions,
    shuffle_questions=True,
    shuffle_answers=True,
    num=3,                    # show 3 random questions out of N
    max_width=800,            # widen the quiz container
    colors="fdsp",            # alternate palette
)

See Display Options for the full parameter list and the CSS variables you can override.

What you don’t get

Without nbgrader’s preprocessor pipeline, you opt out of:

Markdown #### Quiz syntax — you write the question dicts directly.
Auto-generated autograder cells.
Answer-key redaction (graded mode is an nbgrader-only concept).
The responses.json sidecar — student responses live only in the rendered DOM and are lost when the page reloads.

If you want responses persisted for later marking, set preserve_responses=True and instruct the student to copy the text that appears below the quiz. For real graded assessments use the full nbgrader pipeline — see Graded Quizzes.