[ARCHIVED] Combining questions from different quizzes into new bank

[jnissen]

This semester I created Fall Exam 1 (containing six Question Groups) and Fall Exam 2 (also containing six Question Groups). Some of the questions on the exam came from previous quizzes, some from question banks, and some I wrote from scratch. The new questions all seemed to go into an Unfiled Question Bank, while the remaining questions I think are scattered among the previous locations.

1) I want to combine Fall Exam 1 and and Fall Exam 2 into one, comprehensive Final Exam (with twelve Question Groups). How can I do this?

2) Feedback from the students indicated they would have preferred more frequent exams, each covering fewer chapters. For the Spring semester, I would like to use the first four question groups from Fall Exam 1 to create the new Spring Exam 1 (containing four Question Groups), use the remaining two question groups from Fall Exam 1 and the first two question groups from Fall Exam 2 to create the Spring Exam 2 (containing four Question Groups), and the remaining four question groups from Exam 2 to create the Spring Exam 3 (also containing four Question Groups). The method may be the same as above, but in case it's not I wanted to ask how this can be done.

Thanks!

Jill

[James]

 @jnissen ​,

What you describe that you want and what you ask for aren't necessarily the same thing. That's common in Canvas as people get confused about the nomenclature. You say you want to combine two quizzes into a single quiz, but your heading asks about question banks. You do not have to use question banks to have a quiz. But if you don't use a question bank, then the questions go into the "Unfiled Questions" that you mention.

So let me describe how to combine two quizzes into a single quiz without creating your own banks.

1. You start by creating a new quiz, let's call it "Final exam".
2. When you get to the questions tab, click on the Find Questions button.
3. Scroll down on the left side to Unfiled Questions and click on it
4. Select the questions you want by checking the box next to them
5. Scroll down to the bottom and click Add Questions

For me, Canvas provides access to previous semesters, so I see all of the questions I've ever used when I click on Find Questions. It's pretty unmanageable since I've been doing this for 4 years now and have way more than 2 or 3 quizzes each semester and I just added 9 questions with 157 items each (they all go into Unfiled). It should be much easier for you.

If you don't see previous semester's material (and you may not know this if you're new to Canvas) you may want to create the quizzes for Spring 2016 now, just not publish them, then copy them into the new course. You would just create three separate quizzes, but then go through the steps indicated above for each quiz, just picking 4 questions per quiz.

[James]

 @jnissen ​,

After some sleep, I re-read your question and think I might have missed your real question. Somehow I completely missed the word "question groups" the first time through and just read "questions". Sorry.

The answer is the partially the same, though. You can copy questions from your existing banks or quizzes. The questions that were in a bank to start with are found by going to that bank like you did the first time. The questions that were created for a quiz and not part of a bank first are chosen from the pseudo-bank "unfiled questions".

However, if you would like organize your unfiled questions so they are more logically grouped and make it easier to work with in the future, then you can create a new question bank and then move the unfiled questions into that bank. This will also work if you want to reorganize existing banks. See How do I move/copy a question from one question bank to another?  and How do I move multiple questions from one question bank to another?

Like I wrote the first time, you still don't have to create a new bank -- you can just go to the "Unfiled Questions" portion for those that weren't already in a bank. But Question Banks are useful for organizing data.

This next part isn't directly related to your question, but it is a good reminder since you mentioned question banks.

Linking to a question bank instead of copying the questions from a bank into a quiz can be an issue if you need to change a question (a student finds a mistake) or regrade it. See the "Notes" in How do I create a Quiz by finding questions in a Question Bank? and How do I create a Quiz by finding questions in a Question Bank?  for more information on that. If you copy instead of linking the questions and find a mistake, you can regrade some question types but you'll need to go back and change both the quiz and the question bank. If you link instead of copying, you'll only need to change it in the question bank, but any students who have already received the question won't get an updated question and you can't automatically regrade their questions -- it's a manual process.

Determining which students received a bad question from linked question bank can be challenging, especially for large courses or multiple attempts. I've had to go into the Quiz Statistics and download the Student Analysis. Then I scan for the bad question (they're in columns) to see which students took it. Because my questions are often multiple dropdowns or multiple answers, it becomes difficult to determine which answer was given (Canvas seems to return the answers in no set order). You can't regrade multiple dropdown questions anyway but many people use Multiple Choice, True/False, or Multiple Answers and those can be regraded (sometimes) as long as they were copied into the quiz and not linked. See What regrade options are available for a quiz?  for more information.

[jnissen]

I really appreciate all the time and effort that you put in to answering my question!

Unfortunately, it sounds like you are suggesting I create a new quiz? Just go back and find all those questions and regroup them again...and then for the spring semester, just do that. Four times. And that is precisely what I am trying to avoid.

The original questions came from 26 chapter quizzes, some publisher test banks, the "unfiled questions" that i mentioned before. Is there no way to take Fall Exam 1 and say "Create a NEW question bank" that contains all of the questions on the quiz? and then take Fall Exam 2 and say "add these questions to an existing question bank"? And use that beautiful, new, updated, complete question bank to build my final and all 4 spring exams?

[James]

As far as I know, there is no way to easily convert an existing quiz into a bank in a single step. There is a currently open feature request for that:

However,  @Robbie_Grant ​ offered a solution here: Quiz banks . I haven't tested that myself and so I don't know whether or not you can copy multiple banks into the same one using that process. However, if they come through in separate banks, then you can move them from one bank into another: How do I move multiple questions from one question bank to another?

If you find the whole export/import process too complicated, you could just combine all the banks into one by going back and combining them by finding them in their original locations and moving them into a common bank.

Even though you think you want everything into one bank, my experience with banks is that it's probably not a good idea to put that many items into a single bank, It makes picking the type of questions difficult and banks use pagination and the "select all" button only selects what's on the current screen. You'll have to scroll down and load more repeatedly if you have everything in one bank and then select all.  When you create the content for the quizzes, you'll have to hunt down the questions in the bank, which are arranged alphabetically by question name and not by the order you put them in there. So unless every question has a consistent naming scheme starting with the chapter or unit, it's not going to be easy to find things. And because of the pagination, you'll have to keep loading more questions to find anything after the first chapter. You may have one bank that could be used for the final, but it would not be useful for each of the other quizzes.

Banks are more useful if you group them by topic and possibly type of question. A consistent naming scheme is also beneficial (like start all multiple choice questions with "mc" -- or ch01mc". So rather than creating a single bank for all of them, it would be better to create a smaller bank for each quiz with just the material on that quiz. Then you can quickly create the smaller quizzes from a bank and when it comes to the final, you just repeat the "find questions" process for each of the larger banks.

But yes, I'm recommending you just create new quizzes. Your desire to "do it once and be done with it" suggests that you're not going to be changing the questions over time. Once you get the quizzes created, you can just copy them from semester to semester and course to course. Also because although the process is repetitive, it only needs done once (or twice if you count the regular quizzes and the final). I hate repetitive tasks and will spend hours programming something that would only take me 15 minutes to do the first time, so I understand the frustration. You could have already created the new quizzes and pulled the information together in the time it's taken to research this and you still have to do the export and import of existing quizzes into question banks. And if you duplicate the questions and don't get the settings right, then you may have the questions in multiple banks, which itself can be confusing when you try to find stuff. But if you're determined to go that route, I really would encourage you to follow Robbie's advice and do it in a non-live course.

[jnissen]

I think what I am going to try is copying the Exam 1 six times into my sandbox course. Since there were six question groups, I can then delete five out of the six groups in each copied version. leaving me with each of the question groups as its own separate quiz. That should make it easier to use the "find questions" tool later. However it still seems I will need to create the basic framework of question groups when I write the final exam.

I wish there was some way to just "merge" exams, and then I could go into the question groups and define the number of questions and points per question that I want to use from each group on the final.

[kona]

 @jnissen ​, when copying from one course into another my experience is that it doesn't create duplicates of the content it, it just replaces it. The best way to create duplicate content is to copy something in one course back into the same course.

[markr2321 · Accepted solution]

See https://elmira.instructure.com/courses/49/pages/quiz-to-question-bank

for clear, easy instructions on exporting a quiz not in an item bank and then importing that quiz into an item bank in another course.

[PeyiSA]

Wow! Been searching for hours and this really is a clear and fairly simple way to achieve what I needed. whew! For some reason the link seemed forbidding, but it is an excellent explanation. This is what I needed. 

[PeyiSA]

Wow! Been searching for hours and this really is a clear and fairly simple way to achieve what I needed. whew! For some reason the link seemed forbidding, but it is an excellent explanation. This is what I needed. It took me less than 5 minutes to create question banks for about 14 quizzes that had transferred from Sakai without question banks. I simply followed the guide. Step one: export them as QTI, step 2 import them again immediately using the downloaded QTI files and voila- they arrived in Canvas as duplicate quizzes with accompanying question banks. I could have danced with relief. 

I was also able to use the same approach to create a new quiz that combined questions from 7 quizzes, then simply export and import it again as a QTI file. It took me about 3 minutes to do it and everything was perfectly completed with the same titles and information. I only had to delete the duplicate quiz. Thank you for the link to this Elmira guide. Simply the Best "how to" I've seen.