Guarantee unique student data in formula questions?

[tstanzel]

Is there some way to ensure that students get a unique set of data from a formula question? As it is I am generating 200 sets of data just to have a 50% chance my 17 students all get unique data. And that's assuming canvas actually generates 200 unique sets and doesn't duplicate them for some reason. It should not be that hard to tell it to not assign a set of data once it's been assigned (or to keep it from duplicating a set).

[James · Accepted solution]

 @tstanzel  

No, there is no way to guarantee this outside of generating 17 different quizzes and then using differentiated assignments to assign each student an individual value.

Each quiz question is independent of the others and Canvas does not look at what other students have been given, or what the current student has been given on previous attempts, when picking the values.

Sampling without replacement has some issues: It's possible that the number of attempts my exceed the number of generated solutions (you make 17 versions now, but next year you have 20 students -- or you have 17 versions, but allow unlimited attempts). The requests to use a version come in at different times, so a database lookup of questions that were used would have to be used and this would have to be done for each of the formula questions so you potentially run into timing issues. It is possible to regenerate the questions after some students have taken the quiz (for example, you found a question with an error in the formula).

All of those issues have solutions that could be implemented, but they won't be implemented for Classic Quizzes since Canvas has stopped development on those and announced a timeline for deprecation of them.

You could make a feature idea for this. It has been asked about in the past so there might be some demand for it.