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 versus the classic quizzes. 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):

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 randomize questions in quizzes.

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.