Update, October 26, 2022: Canvas has updated its timeline for New Quizzes and has removed the June 2024 enforcement date. Please refer to the Canvas@UD New Quizzes Transition Update.
Update, December 20, 2021: Canvas has updated its timeline for New Quizzes. Classic Quizzes will be available for use through June, 2024. New Quizzes will still be available as a feature to enable in your course, and the Canvas@UD staff is working on its implementation schedule as Canvas is now allowing more local control of the implementation phases. We will update you as that process progresses. For more information, please see the Canvas community blog post, Extension for Classic Quizzes.
Update, October 1, 2021: Canvas has updated its timeline for New Quizzes. Creation of Classic Quizzes will be prevented starting in July, 2022. Existing Classic Quizzes may be edited and taken by students through June, 2023.. For more information, please see New Quizzes Timeline Overview.
Since the New Quizzes tool was enabled as a course feature option in August (Canvas@UD New Quizzes Available), you may be asking yourself if you should start using it in your courses. The answer depends on how well Classic Quizzes is meeting your needs.
If Classic Quizzes suits your course needs, you can continue using it for now. If not, you should speak to a consultant in the IT-ATS Welcome Bar before you create your quiz to determine if New Quizzes offers a better solution. Canvas@UD has enabled the feature option so that faculty who wish to explore New Quizzes may do so. Active development continues to provide New Quizzes features prioritized by the user community. We will keep you informed about what to expect moving forward. But please remember, Classic Quizzes is moving toward a planned deprecation and will eventually be replaced.
There are some fundamental differences when creating a quiz in New Quizzes. The quiz is actually an external-tool type assignment and the point value, assignment group, due date, availability dates, and student assignment rules must be set in the assignment, not in the quiz. Once you set those and save the assignment, you can launch the quiz builder. The assignment may have a different point value than the total points of the quiz, and if you configure your quiz in this way, the percentage earned on the quiz will be passed to the assignment. If you need to change any of these assignment settings, you will need to edit the settings in the assignment not in the quiz builder.
Here are some highlights of the new or changed features in New Quizzes:
Quiz Setup and Settings
- Practice quizzes and surveys cannot be created. To make a practice or ungraded quiz/survey, either exclude the assignment from the gradebook in the assignment settings or set the assignment point value to 0 points.
- Question groups are no longer required to randomize questions. A quiz setting for shuffle questions is used instead. If you insert one or more banks of questions into a quiz, all questions can be randomized, instead of just those within a group. If you do not shuffle the questions, the questions from the bank will still be randomized.
- Student submission view restrictions are now an enabled option and have more granular settings. If you do not set restrictions, students can view their submissions including correct answers.
- An online calculator can be enabled in the quiz settings or in the settings for appropriate questions type. Both basic and scientific calculators are available.
- For quizzes with multiple attempts, a waiting period between attempts can be enforced.
- The New Quizzes interface uses a modified Rich Content Editor interface for instructions, question prompts, and student text entry. But the editor does not support all of the functions of the standard RCE.
For more information about quiz settings, review the Canvas guide, How do I manage settings for an assessment in New Quizzes?.
New Question Types
There are now more question types to choose from such as:
- Hotspot – Upload an image for students to identify a specific area in that image.
- Ordering – Require students to place answers in a specific order. Note that there is no partial credit awarded.
- Categorization – Require students to place answers in the correct categories while ignoring all distractors. Note that there is no partial credit awarded.
- Stimulus – Create a stimulus passage and add/attach one or more questions (choose from all question types) that are related to that passage.
Changes to Existing Question Types
Some existing question types have different options or grading policies:
- The Multiple Choice question type has the option to shuffle question responses on a question-level and to vary the point values of answers.
- The Multiple Answers question type has the option to shuffle question responses. For grading, either partial credit can be awarded for each correct answer with a penalty for each wrong answer as in Classic Quizzes, or you can require an exact match only for full credit with no partial credit awarded.
- The Matching question type has the option to shuffle the matching terms.
For grading, students must get all matches correct to earn full points. There is not an option to assign partial credit for matching questions as this question type is graded in Classic Quizzes.01/15/2022 Update: The matching question type now offers both full and partial credit, please see Canvas Release Notes – January 15, 2022. - There is now only one Fill in the Blank question type because the Fill in Multiple Blanks question type has been removed. But you can can have multiple blank spaces and include various answer types in the Fill in the Blank question. Fill in the Blanks can have Open Entry, Drop Down, or Word Bank answer types. For Open Entry, there are now matching specifications including Contains, Close Enough, and Exact Match, and regular expression matching can be used.
- The Essay question type has options to enable/disable the rich content editor for input, spell check, show word count, and limit word count. You can also add grading notes that will display next to the question as a reference to help you grade student responses.
- The Numeric question type has made some changes to the comparison settings, and you can select Exact Response, Margin of Error, Within a Range, or Precise Response.
- The File Upload question type allows multiple files to be submitted, but you can set a maximum number of files. If the Limit File number option is not selected, students are allowed unlimited uploads. You can also restrict file types using file extensions. Annotations tools are not available when grading file upload submissions in SpeedGrader.
- The Formula question type changed the tags used to denote variables from [x] to `x `. See the Canvas Formula Quiz Question Helper Function Guide to build your quiz question formula.
- The Multiple Dropdown question type has been removed, but the same question format can be created with the Fill in the Blank question type.
- The Text (no question) question type has been removed, and is replaced by the new Stimulus question type. Note that unlike the Text (no question) type, the Stimulus question type requires a question to be associated with the passage.
Other Changes
- Questions can be duplicated while building the quiz.
- Question Banks are now Item Banks which are now associated with an account, not a course. You can add questions to an item bank as you create them in a quiz. You can also share an item bank with another user.
- On the quiz Moderate tab, you can view and grade student submissions, filter attempts, view a log of activity for each attempt, manage assessment accommodations, re-open an attempt so that a student can continue taking an assessment if there is time left, and close in-progress attempts. Accommodations can now be stored for a student to apply to all New Quizzes in the course.
- A question navigator appears to the left of your build screen to provide a summary of the quiz, quick access to the instructions and questions, and buttons to move questions. Students can also use the navigator to pin questions for review.
- In the same way as assignments, a New Quizzes quiz has a “duplicate” tool on its option menu to make a copy. It will create a quiz with the word “Copy” appended to the name.
You can migrate existing Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes individually, but there is no bulk migration utility at this time. Also, question banks in Classic Quizzes cannot be directly migrated to New Quizzes item banks, but please visit the IT-ATS welcome bar to speak to a consultant about work-arounds for migrating question banks. If you create a New Quizzes quiz, you cannot revert it to Classic Quizzes, so consider your decision wisely before investing significant time building a quiz.
Remember this is an adjustment for students, too. If you decide to incorporate a New Quizzes quiz with existing Classic Quizzes in your course, be sure you prepare your students for both to avoid confusion.
For more information, visit the New Quizzes Instructor Guide or the New Quizzes Hub. If you have any questions about the changes or about how to use Canvas effectively, IT-Academic Technology Services staff is always available at the IT-ATS Welcome Bar or you can send your questions to canvas-info@udel.edu.
| Date | Change Log |
| 10/20/2022 | Updated resource links to point to New Quizzes Hub |
| 1/15/2022 | Updated matching question |
| 12/20/2021 | Updated timeline message |
| 10/01/2021 | Updated timeline message |
| 04/06/2021 | Updated timeline message |
