[ARCHIVED] Why can't I change the title of a Quiz question?

[jsc]

Hi!

I have changed the title of a question in a quiz to "2.1", but still shows as "Question 2"!?

This is my title:

This is what it looks like in Preview:

And when I go back to editing the quiz, it still says "2.1".

Thanks in advance

Jeppe

[Steve_Watts · Accepted solution]

Hi  @jsc ‌

I don't believe it's possible to change the question title that's seen by students and in quiz preview. The question title that you add when you create the question is only seen by teachers when editing the quiz or browsing question banks. I think the main purpose of letting you add a question title is to help teachers quickly locate questions in a course that has a lot of quizzes/questions. Students will always see Question 1, Question 2 etc when taking a quiz regardless of what question titles have been used by the teacher.

[James]

 @Steve_Watts  is right. It really is for the instructor or quiz creator to be able to identify the question.

There have been some who want the question title to show to the students. If you need that, then include it as part of the question text. Canvas tries to reduce the options available so the interface is clean, so they don't want to put in an option "show title" for each question or even for each quiz.

Including the question title is problematic for several reasons and those reasons are enough to say it's better not to put it at all.  Let's say that the question number was ch5q37. 

• That's what would show up on the quiz. It is meaningless for most students.
• That's perhaps an acceptable title when it's question 37 from chapter 5, but let's say that was in a question bank and it was selected and it's now question 2 on the quiz.
• It helps student cheat. If the questions came from a publisher's bank and a student has managed to obtain a copy of the publisher's bank somehow and has it available while taking a quiz. It just became a lot easier to get the questions correct.
• If you use question banks, the order is random, so any title based on position is problematic.

Even simple naming like "question 1", "question 2", ... is not always safe. I remember learning to program in the BASIC programming language many years ago -- I know, I'm dating myself, so don't tell my wife. One of the practices they taught us was to number the lines by 10 so that we could go back and insert another line in the middle. The analogy is that you might have titled the questions something more innocent like "question 1", "question 2", etc. But then let's say that you made a mistake and now question 5 really needs to be switched with question 2 or you need to add a new question between question 3 and question 4. Unfortunately, it would be more confusing to the students to have it say "question 10", "question 20", "question 30" instead of 1, 2, and 3.

[RWoodruff]

I have to say this is pretty frustrating, especially for low-stakes reading quizzes. I made a series of reading quizzes for a course (17 quizzes) and put the location of the answers in the title of every question in all of the quizzes. Reading this, it looks like I will have to go back and edit every single question in every quiz if I want students to see the location of the answers in their reading. This is frustrating to say the least! It would be nice if instructors had the ability to name their questions in the way they see fit. 

[DianeThomas1]

I agree this is frustrating. I'm trying to create a quiz that combines multiple choice questions with an open response field (using the essay question option) to allow respondents to expand on one of their m/c answer options. I tried to title the essay question field: Question 2 Open Field, with the instructions "If you chose "Other" as your answer in Question 2, please expand here:" But it will only come up as Question 3 to learners. Does anyone know another way to accomplish this?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello @DianeThomas1 ...

I selected this Guide as an example: How do I create a Multiple Choice quiz question? - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Per the Guide (under the heading "Set Name, Type, and Points), it states (highlighting is my own):

Quiz questions are not automatically numbered for instructors. To add a custom name to your quiz question, enter the name in the question text field [1]. Custom names can help you identify quiz questions more easily. Regardless of the question name, students always see quiz questions in numerical order (i.e. Question 1, Question 2).