Option to set or turn off shuffle answers at question level in a quiz

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 

Currently when you create a quiz there is the option to shuffle answers within each question on the quiz. This is great and I love the feature; however, if you have questions with answers where one option is all of the above or A and B are correct, the shuffle answers option is hindrance. These types of questions will not make sense to the student if the shuffle answer setting is turned on in the quiz. It would be nice to be able to set this option at the question level or at least have the ability to override the setting for individual questions in a quiz.

    

Comments from Instructure

This idea was completed with general availability of Quizzes.Next.  You can find more information about the overall project in the Quizzes.Next User Group.‌

  • Quizzes.Next is now available for all paid accounts.
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  • Quizzes.Next updates will be included in the Canvas Release Notes. This includes new features, updated features, and relevant fixed bugs. New and updated features will be deployed to Quizzes.Next near the same time as the Canvas release. Fixed bugs may be deployed at any time.
26 Comments
jcolvin
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

This is a great idea!

claude
Community Novice

Yes. Blackboard has had that option for a long time. But at least the older version of Bb we used to have forced you to create individual settings for each question, which was unnecessarily time-consuming. A default setting that we could override as needed for some questions would be perfect.

rjr
Community Novice

I've also encountered situations in which a particular type of question that an instructor has means that the quiz can't be shuffled. So the ability to shuffle some but not all would be very nice.

I wonder, however, if this might work better as a feature of a group of questions (such as a given question bank)? I know that that is not as flexible and has a few more inital set up steps but I wonder about the overhead of having this an option on every question we create (irrespective to whether it defaulted to on or off).

bsr
Community Contributor

The lack of this option created a bit of a nightmare for me last spring, when my course was moved from Sakai into Canvas. Sakai had this option at the question level, which gave me flexibility to use different types of questions in the same quiz. I didn't realize that Canvas didn't support this option until I started getting flooded with complaints about poorly-worded and incorrect quiz answers, which turned out to be the ones that were not supposed to be shuffled. I would very much like to have this feature in Canvas. In Sakai, it was a simple check box in the question creation window.

reitel
Community Novice

Agreed a great idea. One suggestion to implement this would be to have a "DO NOT SHUFFLE" flag or setting at the question level. This would still allow setting a "global" shuffle On/Off at the quiz level but preserve the answer order on specific questions where the order of the potential responses is important. . .  

claude
Community Novice

That would be even better.

bsr
Community Contributor

Agreed! This would be the best of both worlds!

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

When we first moved our courses to Canvas we undertook a long process of editing every single one of the "All of the above"-type questions to read "All of these answer choices are correct" (or "None of...," as the case might be). Having the option to override shuffling answer choices for those questions would have been a real time saver. ​

biray
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

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caryn
Community Member

This would be a very helpful feature for instructors who include a question with the all of the above or none one of the above options. This is a low priority for the UC Irvine community.