Randomized questions with randomized answer picker

[MariaDorfer-Fri]

Hello Canvas Community!

As a teacher I would like to use in the new quiz randomized questions in combination with randomized answer picking to prevent cheating. The preferred question type is multiple choice.

For example:

A question has 12 answers but only 4 randomized answers will be picked for the question in a quiz. This makes it much harder to cheat: student A will probably get the same question, but not the same answer choices for this question, as student B.

We would really look forward to a solution to this topic.

Thanks!

Maria

[JeffCampbell · Accepted solution]

I do not know about picking only 4 out of 12 possible answers. If truly random, this introduces the potential for it to randomly pick 4 incorrect answers, preventing the student from even getting the question correct. A possible solution would be to have multiple correct answers out of the 12 options, but then you also run into the situation where students could randomly draw multiple correct options to select.

Another possible solution would be to create an item bank with multiple similar questions. As a math example, imagine 10 different math equations that are all similarly testing single digit multiplication. The quiz randomly pulls 5 questions. Each student may get different questions than the person next to them, making it harder to cheat, but because they are all similar in design, you can reliably evaluation student mastery of single digit multiplication.

With multiple choice, you can randomize the order of the questions, but I'm not sure you can randomly pull from a pool of answers.

[MariaDorfer-Fri]

@JeffCampbellThank you very much for your quick and detailed reply! We had this use-case in another learning management system as a self-developed plug-in. The algorithm of the code prevented the quiz tool from picking only incorrect or correct answers by taking minimum one correct and one incorrect answer out of 10 possible answers from the question bank. We are now looking for a similar solution.

Thank you for the alternative solution. We have considered it already and I think it is a good option if there is no technical solution.

[JeffCampbell]

That would be a useful feature for quizzes.