This article will describe the Canvas quizzing features and guide instructors on the best practices for creating and using them in their courses, especially when making the transition from eClass. The transition to Canvas quizzes is complicated because our new LMS has 2 separate quiz tools, both different from what we are used to in eClass. The table below outlines these differences.

The recommended option is to use New Quizzes. 

The instructions and linked guides below will reflect the new quiz engine and workflows compared to the classic quizzes. However, there may be some conditions or use cases where classic quizzes make more sense, so instructors requiring that information should refer to the Canvas Community documentation for more information.

Classic Quiz vs New Quiz

When creating a quiz on Canvas, you will immediately be prompted whether to choose a classic quiz or a new quiz:

At this time, we recommend using the new quiz engine for most purposes. The classic-style quiz will not continue to receive updates and will likely be discontinued and phased out at some point in the future. In general, new quizzes have better options for adding attempts and adjusting time limits for students, more question types, and a question bank similar to the Moodle question bank with improved options for sharing questions between instructors and courses. 

Any quizzes and questions automatically migrated as a part of the mass migration from eClass for Wave 2 of the LMS transition will use the New Quiz format. Any quizzes that are manually migrated will transfer as Classic quizzes.

It is important to note that a classic quiz can be migrated to a new quiz, but not the other way around. Questions from classic quizzes can be converted into new quizzes but questions created for new quizzes are not backwards compatible. The 'migrate' function is the only way to transfer classic quiz questions to new quizzes, so only deployed questions can be moved to item banks.

The table below illustrates some key differences, but note that the main features of classic quizzes absent in new quizzes are the option to break up exams into sections separated by text headings and the ability to export student analysis reports showing all responses from students (both of which are slated for release by Canvas in Q4 2024):

Distinguishing New or Classic Quizzes

If you already have a quiz on Canvas, the easiest way to determine whether it is a new quiz or classic quiz is the icon:

Within the quiz settings, if you see a Build button at the bottom, it is a New Quiz:

If you see a tab at the top to access the questions, it is a Classic Quiz:

Adding New Quizzes

The basics for adding new quizzes is well documented in the Canvas knowledge base guide for adding new quizzes.

Some important settings to note are:

Points: The number of points the quiz will be worth in the gradebook - This can be different from the total of marks in the quiz, that total will be scaled to this value

Assignment Group: If you using assignment groups to weight items in your gradebook, then this will determine which weight group the quiz is associated with:

Display Grade as: This determines how the grade is displayed to students and in the gradebook. Grades can be shown as a percentage or a letter grade (using a grading scheme) or complete/incomplete (100% grades show as complete).

The Assign To section allows quizzes to be released at different times to course sections or individual students: 

If an 'Available Until Time' AND a 'Time Limit' are both set for a quiz, the 'Available Until Time' takes precedence. In other words if a student launches a 30 minute quiz, 15 minutes before the close time, they will only receive 15 minutes to write the quiz. If it is after the quiz launch time, Canvas does not display the quiz close time when students are launching their attempt so this information may also be written into the description field for the quiz.

You can add additional Assign to boxes to create different settings for individuals or sections. This may be useful when deploying quizzes at different times for different sections of a course or when students require accommodations. For more information on providing different quiz delivery times for specific students, please see Student Accommodations in Canvas Quizzes.

The bottom-right of the page has buttons to save your settings or continue on to the Build page, where you can add questions, adjust quiz-specific settings, like time limits and question behaviors, and access moderation settings for individual students (set accommodations):

Note: Once any student has taken a quiz, you cannot unpublish it.

You can also get to the Build page by clicking the vertical ellipsis icon (⋮) next to a quiz and selecting 'Build' from the menu there:

For further details, please see Canvas' complete documentation on New Quizzes.

Available New Quiz Question Types

Once the new quiz has been added and built, you will need to add questions through the Build menu - either pulling them from migrated item banks or by creating them manually. The Canvas support portal has in-depth guides on adding the different new quiz question types:

Multiple Choice
Essay
File upload
fill in the blank
True or False
Numeric
Multiple Answer
Ordering
Categorization
Formula
Hot Spot
Matching
Stimulus content (useful for displaying a single image, video, or other media and delivering a series of questions alongside)

Using New Quiz Item Banks

New Quizzes use Item banks rather than question banks to save and share content. For ease of access, ensure that your course has an item bank link in the left-side navigation menu by dragging it to the upper section in your course settings >> Navigation (tab). The item bank is never visible to students.

Item banks can be used to organize questions and to pull questions or random sets of questions into quizzes by clicking the Item Banks button at the top of the 'Build' page in the new quiz (or by clicking the + button and then the folder icon on the question type chooser), selecting the desired bank, then selecting individual questions or + All/Random:

If you wish to give different students different subsets of questions (ie. select 5 questions from each bank for each student), this is configured after the random question is created by clicking the edit icon for the random question set:

The Canvas knowledge portal contains complete documentation on using item banks and randomizing questions in quizzes.

When working with Item Banks migrated from eClass, especially in courses with a large or deep hierarchy of question bank categories, users will sometimes encounter challenges in organizing questions since Canvas Item Banks do not allow nesting. The default sort order which cannot be altered is alphabetical but when adding questions to quizzes from the build screen, it is possible to sort the item banks by latest activity which can help identify between common bank names.

Note that there is a known issue when copying item banks from a course where a bank is shared with 'Edit' permisions, the sharing will revert to 'View' permissions.

This can be adjusted by clicking the sharing icon for that bank:

Then changing the dropdown beside the new course from View to Edit:

Setting up Canvas Quiz Accommodations

It is possible to provide students accommodations on quizzes either by adding additional time or by entering a time multiplier (but not both at the same time). These can be entered for individual quizzes or for the all the quizzes in the course.

See the Canvas documentation for how to enter accommodations and Student Accommodations in Canvas Quizzes.

Canvas Quiz Known Issues

Through the Fall 2024 term and the beginning of Winter 2025, we have identified a number of issues with quizzes that instructors need to be aware of and take steps to mitigate for successful delivery of exams. These issues have been reported to the vendor.

Instructors should ensure they review ALL quiz questions thoroughly before using them in summative exams and should also register their exams for a review with eClass support.

1. Performance Problems when Editing Quizzes

Quizzes with numerous questions or that pull random or all questions from item banks are sometimes slow to load and sometimes display the error message "NetworkError when attempting to access resource" when editing.
Workaround: Refresh page. Update: Canvas engineering has released a fix for this issue.

2. Using Item Bank questions that contain images

Canvas released a fix in November 2024 to address issues relating to image permissions and images in item bank questions created in 1 course and then copied to another course. This fix is still being propagated across all questions and files in Canvas so quizzes may still contain images that still point to previous courses.
Workaround: This problem can be identified (and resolved) by opening any item bank questions that contain images, clicking in the editor panel, clicking an image, viewing the Image options, confirming the url type, and if it is course-based without a verifier link (see video) ,re-uploading the image and then clicking Done at page bottom to trigger a new save on the question:

Note: There are sometimes short delays before the new url will display in questions but once they appear, all images with new urls should function in quizzes regardless of their original course of origin or the published status on the file.

Update Jan 30/2025:
Canvas engineering has offered to run the image fix on any specific quizzes and questions where instructors have identified broken images. Please contact eClass support for more information about that.
 

3. Using 'Vary Points by Answer' with random questions

The option to 'Vary Points by Answer' prevents the option for instructors to customize the point value for 'all or random' question pulls into quizzes from those item banks. These 2 features CANNOT be used together or else students will see different quiz total point values than expected. 
Workaround: Use these questions with their actual scores and scale the overall quiz value on the assignment settings page.

4. Manually importing eClass quiz questions does not use the latest question version 

When manually importing quiz questions from eClass using backup and restore, the latest versions of questions are not imported into Canvas. This issue does not occur if questions are migrated as a part of the K16 process. A few steps would be required to flatten all the versions to the latest.
Workaround: Perform a manual export/import of the questions within eClass before running the backup and download.
If question version edits have been minor, these could be re-written when reviewing question in Canvas.

To flatten a list of question bank questions in Moodle:

1. 1. Organize the questions desired into a single category.
   2. Export that category as a Moodle XML format.
   3. Import the XML file created into another course (sandbox, non-credit creation, a different location)

The questions will then be the single, latest version. To transfer these into Canvas, you would need to create a quiz comprised of these questions; treating a quiz as if it were a question bank category, then export the mbz from Moodle into Canvas.

5. Setting IP Address restrictions prevents instructors from previewing a quiz

The preview page will spin for any quiz that uses IP address restrictions. 
Workaround: Remove the IP address restrictions will constructing and previewing a quiz and only enter them when a quiz is launched. It is also an option to duplicate the quiz, remove the restrictions, and preview that version.

6. Quiz instructions do not preserve formatting

Paragraphs and other formatting entered into the description of quizzes is dropped when students view quizzes. 
Workaround: None.

Update Jan 30/2025:
Canvas engineering have created a fix that has passed initial QA testing is currently undergoing beta testing in advance of release.

7. New quiz titles do not update

Any edits made to new quiz titles on the Assignment editing page do not reflect in the Build page for the quiz. 
Workaround: Copy any changes over manually.

8. Unable to edit quiz question

The message below can appear even if there are no actual student submissions. One common reason is that the quiz was accessed using Student View, which includes a Test Student attempt. The Test Student behaves similarly to a real student submission and can trigger this message, even though it does not appear in the Moderate tab. Note that this issue is different from the problems editing questions stemming from course copies of shared item banks identified above.
Workaround: Make a copy of the question to use in the quiz, or if the quiz was imported from a previous course, re-importing it may resolve the issue. There are no known issues with creating copies of quiz questions.

9. Timer issues when re-admitting students to quizzes

Instructors can re-open a quiz attempt from the 'moderate' section of a new quiz, by clicking the pencil icon next to the student's entry. This may be useful, for example, if a student experiences issues with their device and the quiz time runs out before they are able to access the quiz again:

However there are two notable issues when doing this: Most importantly, the student will be given the full time from the quiz settings, with no option to override that. As well, there is a bug that causes the timer to be hidden from the student's display when they re-enter the quiz. Canvas is aware of both of these issues and there is currently no workaround.

10. Cannot preview individual quiz questions from the bank for testing.

Canvas can only preview the entire quiz. The best known workaround for this is to place the question to test on the first page as the first question, then preview it.