[ARCHIVED] Formula question for quiz

[koksalan]

I am using the "formula question" tool of Canvas for a question where different students get different numerical values in their questions and Canvas calculates the correct answer according to the formula I give.  I could not find a way to setup such a question as a multiple choice question.  It seems logical to come up with both the correct and incorrect answers using formulas.  Is there a way to do this?  Thanks!

[James · Accepted solution]

 @koksalan  

Formula questions are different from multiple choice questions. Students are expected to come up with the results and enter it as a number, not pick from a list. There is no way within Canvas itself to turn a formula question into a multiple choice question.

I have used formula questions and added to the instructions what the student should enter for an answer. It was a little convoluted, but I had a yes/no or true/false question and put in the instructions to "Enter 1 for yes and 0 for no." You could extend this to more than 2 choices, you would just need to put into the instructions what the students since enter since they will need to enter a number for a formula question.

Another approach is to create multiple versions of the question where you supply the random numbers yourself and then turn it into a multiple choice question. With Legacy (old) Quizzes, you create a question group to hold the variations of the question and then let Canvas randomly pick as many as you need (probably only one). I cannot address what happens with New Quizzes as we don't use those at our institution.

There are a couple of ways that I have done this.

1. I create the questions in Excel and then save them in a format that Respondus can read. I open up Respondus, import the questions from Excel, and then export them to Canvas. This obviously requires Respondus, which is a commercial product, but your institution may own a site license for it.
2. I know how to program, so I wrote a program that would the questions and then create them through the Canvas API. This is a bit trickier and definitely more involved. When I started, I used Excel, as I became more comfortable with the API, I switched to the programmatic method.