Make "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses" Setting Do What It Says (or Say What It Does)

[Beth_Young]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Right now, we have the option to "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses," but that's not exactly what the setting does. I would like either for this setting to do what it says or for the label to be more accurate.

This setting doesn't let students see just their responses, it lets them see how their responses have been scored (see comment below). A more accurate label might be "Let Students See Their Graded Quiz Responses."  I was confused by this label originally and only learned the hard way what it does, and I believe others have been in this same situation.

Because this setting currently shows not just the students' responses, but also whether the responses are correct or not, students who see their own quiz results also learn the correct answer in these situations:

• when the question is true/false
• when the student has correctly answered a question
• when the general comments hint at or explain the correct answer

And for multiple choice and matching questions they have at least narrowed down the options. That's too much information to release to a class while the quiz is still available. Therefore, when I create a quiz, I don't check "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses." However, after I have finished grading the quiz, with this setting they can't see any comments on their graded questions, so I then need to return to the quiz settings and allow students to view their responses. Having to return to the settings screen is a huge pain in the neck and sometimes I forget to do it. When I forget to do it, students can't see the comments that I painstakingly enter on their quizzes, and then they (and I) get frustrated. And when the quiz is imported to a new course next semester, I have to remember to go back and change this setting again.

This problem was discussed in the old feature request forum Show Student Responses without Indicating if the Answer is Correct or Not : Help Center . (That idea was marked "done," but as far as I can determine, it is not done. I believe someone from Instructure confused this idea with something else.) Here is the suggestion from that forum, which includes a very good use case:

There are several related ideas currently open for voting right now, but none of them are the same.

Quiz Essays: Hold "General Answer Comment" Until Due Date or After Grading This idea would suppress the general comment but not the correct/incorrect flag on automatically graded questions.

Quiz Review: option to allow students to see their quiz responses & correct answers only after the d...  This is a different way to solve my use case and the original use case by Raechel Soicher, but it doesn't solve the problem of the misleading setting label.

Option to allow students to view questions after Quiz Due Date for limited time  This is a different way to solve the problem, but it doesn't address the misleading setting label. Also, for my purposes, it doesn't matter if the students can see the whole question. I just don't want them to see how their answers have been scored.

Release answers button for quizzes   This idea (I think) would solve the problem of having to change the quiz settings after a quiz is graded, but it doesn't address the use case posted to the old feature request forum.

My preference would be for the setting label to do what it says, but if that's not possible, please change the label to say what it does.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the:

• Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-28) 
• Canvas Release Notes (2019-02-16) .

[Beth_Young]

I made screenshots for another discussion topic and thought maybe they would be helpful here too. When you check "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses" and UNcheck "Let Students See Correct Answers," students can still see any general comments, as here:

If the student gets an auto-graded question wrong, their answer will be marked wrong. If a student gets the answer right, they will know it is right because there will be no "incorrect" flag and they will have full points showing in the top right corner:

What I originally expected is that "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses" would show the responses that the students entered/selected--not comments, "incorrect" flags, or points.

[scottdennis]

This feature idea is now open for voting.

[lshnayde]

This idea is very important. I think it is natural for most instructors to prevent the students from seeing their quiz results while the quiz is still open for other students, and then release all results (both the student's answers and the correct answers) after the quiz closes. However I do not see a way to achieve this in Canvas, except by manually revising the settings for each quiz to release the results after the quiz closes.

The current set of choices in Canvas for the quiz results does not make much sense for me. Why would anyone want to let the student see their answers - some of the marked  "incorrect" - while the quiz is still open for other students in the class, but not to see the correct answers? I think one can either prefer to release the full report right away or to hide everything until the quiz closing date.

The way I set the quizzes in most of my courses is that each quiz is open for a whole week - so one student can take it on Monday, another student on Wednesday etc. So giving the first student partial results (his answers with notes "incorrect" where applicable) allows him to provide useful hints to the friends who will take the same quiz later in the week.

And I would also make one minute after the quiz closing date the default option for when the results become visible to the students - this way we would not have to manually enter an extra date for each quiz.

[RobDitto]

 @lshnayde , there's an alternate way to do this:

prevent the students from seeing their quiz results while the quiz is still open for other students, and then release all results (both the student's answers and the correct answers) after the quiz closes

Have you tried Mute Assignment in the Gradebook or SpeedGrader?  While Mute is currently something which must be applied manually, it will suppress score and results display after a student's Quiz submission. After submission, a student will only see a message, "This quiz has been muted," and the approximate time their submission took (under Submission Details).

Mute also overrides all of the other Quiz settings you've specified about showing responses and answers, until you Unmute -- at which time those settings take effect.

[Beth_Young]

Huh, I was pretty certain that students could still see their quiz answers when the grades were muted, partly because that's what I was told when I asked my school's tech help that very question, and partly because the "Are you sure" warning doesn't say that students won't be able to see their submissions. It just says it will hide things a teacher might add to their quiz record, e.g., grade, submission comments, etc.

Also, the Canvas Guides (instructor and student) don't make it clear that the "mute" setting hides student answers, just that it hides grades.

But I know you know what you are talking about,  @RobDitto ​, so I tried it just now in "test student" view, and indeed you are right. The mute setting did hide the students' answers from the student.  The only thing that the test student could view when grades were muted is a notice that grades were muted:

This fact makes grading simpler, because I won't always need to go back to the edit screen and change the settings--I can just mute/unmute.

I still think that the "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses" setting should do what it says (or say what it does). And now I also think that the guides could be more clear on what "mute" does, too.

[dschmitt]

What is the update regarding the vote?

I personally want this option to do exactly what it does (although I do agree that the description should explicitly state what the action does, I am fairly new to Canvas and I have had to do a lot of research to find out if the students are informed whether they got the question right). When I grade quizzes and exams I let the students know what questions they got wrong but do not tell them which answer is correct so that they can look over their notes, text… to determine what the correct answer is instead of me just telling them - this provides an opportunity for them to think about the concept again and figure out where they went wrong. Therefore, if they got the question correct they should know what as well.

[jsparks]

Hello team!

We are planning some updates to Canvas Quizzes.We will not likely release this idea as a product update in the next six months, but this is something we want to plan for in a future overhaul of the tool.  For now, we will archive this idea. Please know this is something we would like to deliver.

Jason

[Beth_Young]

Thanks for the encouraging status report!

[cdoherty]

I think it's imperative that confusing labels be corrected, so instructors don't get tripped up by it. It's really a bug, not a feature request, and shouldn't take Canvas over 6 months to correct. There is no way an instructor would be able to know that this feature does something completely different than what it says. It's absurd to expect users to read all the documentation to learn how the system really works.

[kfortin]

I'm sorry to see that voting has closed on this one.  We would also like this feature: to allow students to see which choices they made (for post-quiz review), without any indication of which ones were wrong, which by inference reveals which choices were correct and therefore much of the answer key for multiple-choice quizzes.