[ARCHIVED] Canvas Quiz Grading Incorrectly

[lweber15]

I've created quizzes in Canvas that are Fill In The Blank.  I've given each question a potential 2 points.  After students have taken the quiz, the quiz is scored incorrectly.  Some incorrect answers are give the full 2 points, some correct answers are given no points or given 1 point.  Why is this happening?  Are the quizzes corrupted?  Do I need to recreate them?  I have copied this course a couple of times. Could that be the problem?

[screenshots removed by Community Team to preserve student privacy]

[James · Accepted solution]

 @lweber15  

Your images contain the names of students along with their scores. You should redact the student's names in the images. In this case, no information from the right side is needed, so you may just crop the image or not capture as much in the screenshot.

What you are seeing does not sound normal. That means that much of what I write will be a shot-in-the-dark attempt at finding something that might have happened. Normally it is not a software glitch when this happens, especially since Canvas is not developing legacy quizzes anymore and the codebase is fairly stable.

The behavior you're seeing does not match the description in the Canvas Instructor Guide: How do I create a Fill-in-the-Blank quiz question? where partial credit is not awarded for fill-in-the-blank type questions.

Partial credit is given for fill-in-multiple-blanks questions: How do I create a Fill-in-Multiple-Blanks quiz question?  It doesn't appear that you have multiple blanks, but I have seen cases for multiple-dropdown questions where the output shown after the quiz is taken doesn't match what happens while the quiz is being taken. That is, some of the responses don't appear like the others. Again, I don't think this is a multiple fill in the blank, but if it were, then the #17 figure would have 1 of the 2 questions answered, giving 1/2 the points or 1 out of 2 as shown. You can edit the question itself to see what kind of question type it is and verify this isn't the issue.

Another possibility is that the question point values were changed after the quiz was taken. This does not cause a regrade and could lead to the issue described. If you had a quiz and discovered there were only 95 points possible instead of 100 because of a typo when creating the quiz, you might be tempted to go through and fix the issue by changing the point values on the questions.

This might also happen if you had a question group and changed the make up of it -- for example going from 7 questions worth 1 point each to 5 questions worth 2 points each to achieve that 100 point total. Question groups don't seem reasonable here since your question #17 refers to item 17 and question 18 refers to tag 18. That would not likely happen in a question group where it randomizes the order.

Regrading of questions might be an answer for a different question type, but it's not supported for fill-in-the-blank questions. What options can I use to regrade a quiz in a course? 

Curving the grade shouldn't affect the score on individual questions, but maybe the fudge points. How do I curve grades in the New Gradebook? 

Perhaps the most likely scenario is that someone or some process went through and edited the scores. This might be a TA or if you left your machine logged in (or your password is saved in the browser) and walked away, someone could have accessed it while you were away. Thankfully, there is a gradebook history that will show grade changes. It says for quizzes you can view historical data for any regraded quiz. I would check it out and see if you can find something. How do I view the history of all grading changes in the Gradebook? 

Hopefully one of those rings familiar. If not and I had to troubleshoot based on likelihood and the information you provided, I would start with the human side, regrading the questions, and the gradebook history. Then I would look at the question itself in the quiz. Then I would check the question group settings.

You may also want to clear the cache on the browser or reboot the machine. There may be some kind of network glitch where corrupted data got loaded and refreshing the data fixes it. That's not normally an issue since Canvas tells the browser not to cache things. You might also try pulling it up on a different browser (Firefox instead of Chrome) and see if that fixes it.

If none of those turn up anything, you might include a screen capture of the original question inside the quiz editor. Ultimately, you may need to reach out to Canvas Support and see if they can help. This is a global community of Canvas users and we don't have access to your Canvas instance or course to check things out. Canvas Support and your local Canvas Administrator have access to more information than we do.

[Stef_retired]

Thanks for calling attention to the screenshots,  @James ; we've removed them from the original post with a note.