[New Quizzes] Randomize Fill In the Blank Word Bank Choices
1. Create a blank quiz in the “New Quizzes” system.
2. Create a new “Fill in the Blank” question.
3. Type any sentence and use `backticks` to designate the correct response and where the “blank” should appear.
4. Select “word bank” for the response type.
5. Enter several “distractors” at the bottom of the page.
6. Preview the quiz.
The correct answer will always appear in the second position along the bottom (see screen shot in attachment below). This is functionally equivalent to a multiple-choice type question that always places the correct answer as option “B”. Even worse is if the FITB question has multiple “word bank” responses in the original sentence then all correct responses will appear in the “correct” order in one block starting at the second position. In other words it is trivial for a student to recognize the pattern after taking a couple of quizzes and they will always know where the correct responses appear even if they have no knowledge of the concept.
I consider this a mission critical bug with “New Quizzes” and I think many will agree with me. We created a ticket for canvas support and it did eventually bubble up to the engineering team and they were able to confirm that all “New Quizzes” with this question type will behave as I have described. Unfortunately, however their response is that this is all working as intended. They suggested that if I think that the responses should be distributed in a different way by the system that I should submit an “Idea” to the community for voting, so that is what I am doing.
All responses for FITB word banks should be randomly distributed when presented to students, or allow teachers to explicitly control where correct responses appear.
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