Group/Tag Questions by topic and then randomize quiz.

[sbridge]

I'd like to tag or link each question into a bank to a specific learning target and then ask the quiz to be 20 questions, 2 from each target, randomly selected.  At one point I was told Canvas could do this...that means each student might take a slightly different test.

Is this possible?

[erinhmcmillan · Accepted solution]

Hi, Stephanie,

I hope you have received the guidance you were looking for by this point, but I thought I would follow up just in case! You can do this by creating an Item Bank in Canvas:

How do I create an item bank in New Quizzes?  

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-26425-how-do-i-add-all-items-or-a-random-set-from-an-item-b... 

Hope that helps!

Erin

[bunnb]

I know this post is a couple years old at this point but I'm also trying to do what (I think) was meant by the OP.

I have a Item Bank full of questions for a particular standard; each question in the bank has tags to further differentiate it from other questions in the bank.  For example, the Item Bank may contain questions related to the quadratic equation, and some questions in that bank could be tagged with 'synthesis' (or whatever) to indicate a higher level of Bloom's vs. basic recall questions.

What I'm attempting to do is populate a quiz with random questions from a particular Item Bank with a particular tag.  Another concrete example:

Pull 10 questions at random from the Graph ADT Item Bank that have a 'dijkstra' tag.

Edit: typo

[Ron_Bowman]

@bunnb -

I don't think that is possible, but I have not worked too much with new quizzes and item banks.

Your best method would be to create an item bank for each tag.  How you name the item banks would help with the organization.

i.e. item bank Graph ADT- Dijkstra, Graph ADT - Bellman-Ford, Graph ADT - rules, etc

Then you would just pull however many questions from each item bank.  

[bunnb]

I appreciate the response!

Creating a large amount of highly specific banks is exactly the situation I'm trying to avoid (that's how I've had to do it with 'Old' Quizzes).  Large volumes of banks are harder to maintain and share (not to mention far more time consuming to make when transitioning from 'Old' Quizzes).

Tags are great in theory as they would allow you to create a single repository of your questions by unit/topic/standard/etc., then further differentiate questions with metadata.  Very disappointing that this basic functionality is not supported when the tag infrastructure is already built.  

[Ron_Bowman]

@bunnb 

I completely agree.  There are a few other areas where it would be nice if you could have sub-directories(for lack of a better term) or a tag structure like what you mentioned for whatever you are working on -pages, modules, item-banks.  It is hard to know how difficult it would be to build that into Canvas though.  To us it seems intuitive and should be easy to do.  

Of course I can see where it might get more complicated with what you want to do with tags on questions in a question bank.  And of course you better spell all the tags the same.

Ron

[bunnb]

I've developed a fair bit of software so I understand there is a tremendous amount of complexity involved!  The frustrating part is that all the features already exist - they just don't work together in a useful capacity.

Support for adding tags has been implemented, pulling questions randomly from item banks is already possible, and filtering by tag(s) is now possible.  Yet we can't pull from item banks based on tag(s)??

The transition from 'Old' Quizzes has been cumbersome to say the least, and so far 'New' Quizzes has offered me zero actual improvement in functionality (though I'm sure there are features that might be useful for others).