Is there a way to view student uploads in a quiz without downloading the file?

[mmm67]

If students upload a file in an assignment, the file autoloads in Speedgrader. Why don't quizzes work like this? It is impossible to download quizzes for large classes, both in terms of time wasted, necessary number of mouse clicks and hard drive space. This seems like a ridiculously easy fix on the backend, as it already works in assignments.

[Gabriel33]

In Classic quizzes, it does seem to work like that for me.

I don't usually ask for file uploads in quizzes, but for one class I had students upload their Excel work in an "essay" question inside a quiz.
When they do that, I see the file name and a down arrow. If I click the down arrow, it downloads. But if I click the file name, it opens a preview of the file in the same window.

[jsowalsk]

@mmm67 I have not seen a way to do this with new quizzes.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @mmm67,

My guess is that the annotation features available for files from assignments in SpeedGrader are only designed to work in with a single file (for an assignment you have to toggle from one file to another if there are multiple attached).  Because quizzes can have multiple questions with file upload, it would may create complexity in that code, and the annotation feedback would likely also be a relatively large project to add in for a quiz.

If you're just looking to see the files, the suggestion @Gabriel33 gave to create an essay question and have students upload there *might* be w workaround you could use.  I say might because when using that method, students would technically modify their file after submitting, and they also may run out of storage space because documents upload into the editor count towards storage space, unlike submissions which are basically unlimited.

I hope this possible explanation helps a bit.  There is an existing idea for this at [New Quizzes] Allow File Upload Question Submissio... - Instructure Community - 372767, so you could watch that to see if Instructure does make this a reality at some point in the future.

-Chris