How to Generate Certificates When Students Pass a Google Forms Quiz (2026)

Google Forms can grade a quiz, but it cannot send a certificate to students who pass — that requires an add-on. The complete workflow takes about 10 minutes to set up: turn your form into a quiz, collect email addresses, design a certificate in Google Slides, and let CertifyAll watch the scores. From then on, every student who reaches your passing threshold automatically receives a personalized PDF certificate by email, and every student who doesn't gets an encouraging invitation to try again.

Step 1: Set up the Google Forms quiz correctly

Open your form and click Settings, then toggle on Make this a quiz. This unlocks grading: each question gets a point value and a correct answer. Two settings deserve attention:

• Point values. Assign points to every question you want counted. The quiz total is what your passing percentage is calculated against — a 70% threshold on a 20-point quiz means 14 points.
• Release marks immediately. Keep "Release marks" on Immediately after each submission. The score is final the moment the student submits, which is what allows a certificate decision to be made instantly. (If you use manual review for essay questions, grade those before relying on the auto-score.)

Step 2: Collect email addresses

The certificate has to be delivered somewhere. In Settings → Responses, enable Collect email addresses — either Verified (respondents must be signed in to Google; the address is guaranteed real) or Responder input (they type it; works for respondents without Google accounts).

Alternatively, just add a short-answer question asking for an email. CertifyAll detects email questions automatically, which is the way to go when your audience includes people outside Google Workspace entirely.

Step 3: Design the certificate in Google Slides

Create a new Google Slides presentation — one slide, landscape, is your certificate. Design it however you like: school colors, company logo, signatures, seals. Where the personal details belong, type placeholders as plain text:

• {{name}} — the student's name (mapped to your name question)
• {{score}}, {{total}}, {{percentage}} — quiz results, filled from the actual submission
• {{date}} — the issue date
• {{form_title}} — your quiz's title, handy for reusing one template across courses

For a full design walkthrough — page size, layout, fonts, and the mistakes that make certificates look homemade — see our guide to making a certificate template in Google Slides.

Step 4: Connect CertifyAll and set the passing score

1. Install the add-on. Get CertifyAll from the Google Workspace Marketplace (free) and open it from the puzzle-piece add-ons menu inside your form.
2. Paste your template URL. Copy the Google Slides link and paste it into the CertifyAll sidebar. The add-on reads your placeholders automatically.
3. Map the placeholders. Match {{name}} to your name question; built-ins like {{score}} and {{date}} map themselves.
4. Set the passing threshold. Choose the score a student must reach — say 70%. This is the gate: at or above it, a certificate is generated; below it, a retry email goes out instead.

Step 5: Test it before students arrive

Submit two test responses yourself: one passing, one failing. The passing one should land a PDF certificate in your inbox with every placeholder filled correctly; the failing one should produce the retry email with the score shown. Check the CertifyAll Certificates folder in your Google Drive — the passing certificate's PDF copy is archived there automatically, which becomes your permanent issuance record.

What failing students experience (and why it matters)

Most certificate setups handle failure with silence: the student submits, sees their score, and nothing else happens. That's a missed teaching moment. CertifyAll instead sends students below the threshold an encouraging email with their score and an invitation to try again — so the failure becomes a prompt to re-study rather than a dead end. These emails don't count toward your monthly certificate limit.

Combined with allowing resubmission in Forms (leave Limit to 1 response off), this creates a self-serve mastery loop: attempt, feedback, retry, certificate — with zero work from you after setup.

Native Google Forms vs CertifyAll for quiz certificates

Frequently asked questions