Classic Quiz edited question not updating for students

[jls2245]

This is the first time experiencing this, and I'm wondering if anyone else in the community has seen it happen.

My team has very specific requirements for exams, so the process by which we administer them in Canvas is unusual. Students have to handwrite and submit a scanned copy of their work, but the exams have to be proctored, so we are using Proctorio.

To maintain consistent settings between exams, we import a quiz from a template course, which includes boilerplate placeholder text in a file-upload question, which then gets updated when faculty provide us with quiz details.

My colleague has been importing the template, setting the appropriate dates and times and publishing the quiz so that students will see when the exam will be available well in advance of receiving all instructions from faculty, but he will keep the available-from date set to the future, so that students cannot access the quiz with the incorrect boilerplate text.

There have been several instances this semester where students are seeing the outdated question in the quiz even though we have updated the text in advance of the available-from date. Given how many instances there are, I suspect it isn't because students are navigating to the quiz super early and just leaving it open in their browser.

We haven't been able to nail down the cause of the error, but it is reflected in SpeedGrader—the placeholder text is there in the file-upload question but in the published quiz it is the correct, edited version.

Until we've identified the cause, I've advised my colleague to not publish quizzes until he has the correct text in place, but I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this kind of situation.

[CallieAlreza]

Hello there,

Did you click "Update Question" before saving the quiz?

[jls2245]

Thanks for responding, Callie. The step of clicking "Update Question" seems pretty basic, but it is easily overlooked. I'll check with my colleague about it.

[paul_fynn]

Hi @jls2245,

I'm being slightly guarded with my answer here as most of our work has been with New Quizzes for some time.

Within the last couple of months some major work has been done to cure a problem whereby New Quizzes was losing track of where associated images were kept, and two other issues that were potentially related to tracking of version content included updating an icon file with a replacement and finding that it was recognised in the Browser based version but broken in the mobile version. The second was associated with using Ally to update content in course B for accessibility, then finding that a subsequent course import to course C brought the original version source from Course A, dropping the updates in the process (we call it out Back to the Future Problem).

Those recent works had an adverse effect on our browser based icons, which we had to restore - it fixed the mobile icon issues, and we are not sure about the Ally issues yet.

Perhaps other colleagues might know what precisely the update involved, but I suspect it may implicate replacement_chain_context_type in REST API https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/files.html where it states "

When a user replaces a file during upload, Canvas keeps track of the “replacement chain.”

Include this parameter if you wish Canvas to follow the replacement chain if the requested file was deleted and replaced by another.

Indicates the context ID Canvas should use when following the “replacement chain.” The “replacement_chain_context_type” parameter must also be included."

[jls2245]

This is great feedback, Paul, and it definitely gives me some avenues to investigate. We also have Ally installed, so perhaps that's part of the issue.

Also, thank you for pointing me at the replacement chain! I hadn't spotted that parameter in the API documentation previously, and it could be super helpful.

Thank you for your comment. I'll be sure to update you with any findings.