Update Points for Multiple Choice Quiz without Manually Regrading

[awc]

I currently teach a large undergraduate lecture section. I recently attempted to adjust the number of points that each question was worth in several of my quizzes in the course to make all of the quizzes worth a uniform value. After inputting new point values for my quizzes, Canvas has now marked each quiz as ungraded and now requires manual grading, despite all of the questions being multiple choice questions.

In order to adjust each of my quizzes' point values for all of my quizzes, I would need to manually regrade over 4,000 quizzes with multiple questions in each quiz, again despite all questions in all quizzes being multiple choice. This could easily mean manually regrading over 12,000 questions, all for a quiz that was originally automatically graded.

Adjusting point values for questions is something that would have been very easy to do using Blackboard when my institution used that LMS, and without manually regrading 4,000 quizzes. Is there any way to do this in Canvas?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @awc,

I'm guessing you're using Classic Quizzes in Canvas right now, where this is definitely a pain point.  If you have New Quizzes available in your Canvas course, this gets significantly easier to do because question points are no longer tied directly to overall quiz points.  You can set up a New Quiz assignment to be worth 100 points, but only have 10 1-point questions and everything will scale appropriately (by percentage). I know this isn't necessarily a solution to your direct current issue, but it's probably the best way to do things in the future, as Classic Quizzes are not likely to receive any new features or changes at this point.

Hope this helps! a bit!  Others are free to offer additional guidance about possible fixes or workarounds for Classic Quizzes.

-Chris

[James]

@awc 

@chriscas is right that New Quizzes makes it easier to adjust points, but that doesn't help with the current situation. If all of your quizzes are multiple choice then switching to New Quizzes for the next time you teach the course may the way to go. However, I wouldn't switch just because you'll want to change the point values. You can do that with Classic Quizzes when you go to a new course, just be sure to do it before students take the quiz. I cannot, with good conscience, tell anyone to switch to New Quizzes because they don't support what I need; but support for multiple choice questions is pretty good.

Canvas is not really designed to handle changes after students have submissions. It can handle regrades that result from changing responses to multiple choice questions, but not for deleting questions or changing point values. That's why there are all kinds of warnings trying to stop people from doing what you've done. Changing the points possible could be a potential grade appeal issue.

My question is whether you really need to regrade each question on each of the quizzes?

I went into our beta instance of Canvas (so I don't affect live grades) and changed every question on quiz with only multiple-choice questions to be worth 2 points instead of 1. That changed it from 12 possible points to 24 possible points. When I went into the gradebook, it now shows the assignment is worth 24 but the original grades remained. None of them showed that they needed regraded, though.

There is a warning that "The quiz has changed significantly since this submission was made. This submission may need re-grading." There's a note at the bottom "Since Jane Doe took this quiz, the number of points possible has changed by 12. You can adjust for this change and manually add positive or negative points using this box."

Note that it does not say that you must regrade. It's alerting you to what it things is a potential issue.

The point values within the quiz are wrong. They're worth 1 point instead of 2. The total is wrong. That sure sounds messed up.

However, if you are willing to let the points on the individual questions be wrong and not add up to the total, you can leave them wrong and adjust the fudge points at the top.

For my student who got 11/12 points, I would add a fudge points to be her current score. She now has 11 fudge points plus the 11 points scattered throughout the questions for a total of 22/24.

You can also go to the gradebook and just type 22 in for the student. That will automatically set the fudge points to 11 while leaving the original point values on the questions.

This works for me because all of my original questions were worth an equal score. If I had some questions worth 1 point and some worth 2, I would have to look at all of the questions to decide what the new score should be. This is where the Student Analysis report comes in that gives the points for all students and each question.

But, if you have all the points the same, then it's just a matter of scaling. Mine was simple at doubling. But if you had a 38 point quiz that became a 100 point quiz, then you would need to multiply the existing score by 100/38.

The good news is that you can export the gradebook into Excel, do the scaling there, and the re-import the grades back into Canvas. You would only need to do that once per course rather than 12,000 times (once for each question).

Another option is to go back to the quizzes and reset the point values back to what they originally were. This doesn't allow all your quizzes to be the same, but it does fix the issue of the grade mismatch.

In the future, changes to the structure and point values like this should be made before students take a Classic Quiz.