[ARCHIVED] making a bonus quiz within Canvas

[bschoolf]

Is there still no way to make a quiz "Extra Credit"? I cannot find a box to check when creating a quiz in Canvas. 

[jnissen]

You can create a quiz with each question worth 0 points and manually override the grade to the correct amount of extra credit.

[bschoolf]

Given I have 230 students, that isn't a reasonable option. I already have to do that with my online students who take a test online with extra questions. I have to set the "extra" questions to zero and then touch every single student's test to add the points they've earned. (Rather frustrating.) I don't have time to do this with an assignment I'm giving as extra for my resident students in the LMS.

(I am stunned that Canvas has been around this long and has not come up with an option for this.)

[James]

To answer the question, no, there is no way to specifically mark a quiz as extra credit. For legacy quizzes, Canvas has stopped development on it and the best advice I've seen is in the thread: Creating an Extra Credit Quiz. There are several ways to accomplish extra credit listed there, including some that don't require any grading of the quiz itself.

I haven't used the New Quizzes outside of testing a few things, but it's an assignment that allows you to specify the points possible as well as the points for each question. It would seem that it would be easier to handle extra credit this way -- the quiz could have 10 points but the assignment is worth 0. Again, I do not use New Quizzes, so I cannot say for certain that this is how it behaves.

If you're talking about specific questions on a quiz, then there are ways to make the grading process quicker. I wrote a script that puts the fudge points at the top so you don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom to add them. It also adds a button next to the fudge points that will save the current score and advance to the next user so that you don't have click save, move your mouse to the top, click advance to the next user, and then repeat that process. Note that this doesn't make a question extra credit, it just speeds up the grading process.

[bschoolf]

Wow--to write script--I'm impressed. 

The "New Quizzes"--is this a beta option I need to turn on? Wow--I would love to try that!! I will explore that for the next one.

I am following some advice I read about converting my quiz to a graded survey (etc.). It will produce some confusion with my students--since for a short time, the bonus quiz may not give them much of a boost. Sigh.

Thank you for your advice!!

[James]

That script I mentioned is freely available to anyone who wants to use it. It's a userscript, meaning the individual user gets to use it and you don't have to have a Canvas Admin add it to the entire institution. I didn't mention it by name or provide the link since I wasn't sure you were interested in a single question approach. It's QuizWiz: Enhancements to SpeedGrader and Quizzes and it's one of the few things I've written that I actually use myself (most of what I write is for other people).

New Quizzes may or not be enabled for your institution -- we haven't turned it on yet at our institution, although our Canvas Admin says that we could if we had to. It would mean more support, but it's coming at some point. Right now, it's not up to feature parity with legacy quizzes for the types of questions I use, but it may be for many people (I'm kind of out there on the fringe). It's very different and if your institution has turned it on, I would make the switch in between semesters rather than in the middle of your course. But for some people, it may solve their problems. You can have both types of quizzes in a course, so it may solve the extra credit problem without messing up what you have for everything else.

Development on legacy quizzes has stopped with the focus being on new quizzes. At some point, they will get rid of legacy quizzes and everything will be new quizzes, but that date is still in the future and not even listed on the list of Upcoming Canvas Changes.