Automating the Grading of Retakes and Merging Scores

[XSC]

I am a college mathematics professor and in my courses, I offer students the opportunity to retake quizzes to improve their understanding and grades. The final grade for each problem is the maximum score obtained between the original attempt and the retake. I have been using GradeScope and have written scripts to compare and merge the grades from two exported CSV files. Then I upload the result to Canvas for students to check.

However, this process has proven to be a bit prone to mistakes and is not very transparent for students who wish to see their current standing on a particular problem.

I am reaching out to explore if there is a functionality within Canvas that could streamline this process. Ideally, I am looking for a feature where:

1. Students can have a retake on each quiz. (The retake will be a modified version of the original quiz.)
2. The system automatically takes the maximum of the grades of each problem between the original and the retake as the final grade for that problem.
3. Students can easily see how many points they have secured for each problem and how it contributes to their overall grade.

Thank you!

[JeffCampbell · Accepted solution]

I'm not sure for all of your features, but New Quizzes does allow for retakes, which can be turned on from the quiz settings. It will given an option for the system to keep the highest score obtained. However, I believe this is the highest overall score. So if they answer something correctly on the first attempt, but incorrectly on the second attempt, and the second attempt is the better overall grade, it will not give them points for answering correctly on the first attempt. There IS a feature that can be enabled to "Build on Last Attempt," which allows them to retake the quiz, but only retake the questions they got wrong the first. time. You can find some more info here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-manage-settings-for-a-quiz-in-New-Quizz...

As for it providing a modified form of the quiz for retakes, that I am not sure it will do by default. At least with Classic Quizzes, you could set up question banks. For Math, this was pretty useful as you could build banks based on specific mathematical concepts and just load it up with a variety of problems that address that concept. When setting up the quiz, you could have it randomly pull X number of questions from the bank. With enough questions, you could give a quiz to a class of 50 people that pulled 5 questions from the bank and chances were low that any two students would have the exact same 5 questions. I believe it randomly pulled again if a retake was attempted, so the retake might have different questions from the original. Now, with that said, I'm not sure if Item Banks for New Quizzes works the same way. I have not used it enough to test that feature. Maybe someone with more experience in New Quizzes could report on this aspect. But if it worked, that could feasibly address your first feature. In combination with the "Build on Last Attempt" setting, that could feasibly address all of your concerns. I'm not sure if that setting would force new questions or give students the same questions again. It makes me curious though.