removing questions from a quiz

[khan_yas]

Hello,

I have an instructor that needs to remove questions from a quiz which students have already taken. None of the regrade options are applicable as the instructor wants the question removed (10 questions with 2 to be removed). If we remove the questions the quiz will now appear out of 8 and not 10. Is there a way to do this and have the calculated total updated without doing this manually? Is this something that has been resolved in the new quiz system with canvas?

Thank you in advance.

[gnoack]

HI @khan_yas

Once students have taken a quiz, you can't delete questions. This is for academic integrity for the students. This is true for both new and old quizzes. The only options the instructor has for the questions he wants to remove are:

• Award points for both corrected and previously correct answers
• Only award points for the corrected answer
• Give everyone full credit for this question
• Update question without regrading

Regrade Options

Old Quizzes

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/What-options-can-I-use-to-regrade-a-quiz-in-a-co...

New Quizzes.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-regrade-a-quiz-question-in-New-Quizzes/...

[StephenGregory · Accepted solution]

This is not quite correct. You cannot actually remove the question from the quiz after it has been taken by the class...

But you can give zero marks for the question and have it re-marked out of the new lower total score, which achieves the same thing as far as Gradebook is concerned.

The way to do it is to start by going to the 'cover page' for the quiz and lowering the points assigned to the whole quiz by 1 (say from 10 to 9). It will tell you that you need to regrade (which we will in a minute).  Click on Save at the bottom of the page.

The obvious next step would be to go into the quiz - don't do that. Instead go into Speedgrader. Click on Regrade for the bad question. Set the points to zero and hit Regrade. It will ask how you want to apply it - leave it on the default and click Regrade.

The question should now be worth zero, and the overall quiz will be out of 9. Everyone's marks should be as if the question was not included in the test. 

I feel like this is an ugly hack, but it works. 

Note that the actual quiz is unaltered - if you give it again, the bad question will still be there and score 1 point, but the quiz will be out of 9 instead of 10 (not what you want!). So make sure to go back and edit your quiz for next time. 

Also note that you have to do that step of lowering the total quiz score first before trying the regrade. Or bad things happen 🙂

[JLan]

I don't see an option of changing the points assigned to the whole quiz. What do you mean by the quiz "cover page", please?

[adbouguen]

Hi, 

I don't understand why you would not be able to delete a question from an old quiz. It has nothing to do with integrity. It happened that a question was too hard and none of the students were able to answer it. Or, a question was imprecisely formulated and students were confused. In that case I would simply like to be able to drop the question from the final grade. Is there a way?

[thomasyl]

Here is how I dealt with "dropping" a question ... imperfect hack, but there you are.  

[1] I had two questions on a quiz (already graded) that proved too ambiguous.  My poor wording.  These were multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions.

[2] I edited each question by *adding* a new answer that I labeled "not relevant".

[3] I edited each question by making my *new* answer the (only) correct answer.  In the instance of the multiple-answer question, this was the only correct answer.

[4] I had to "uncheck" all previously correct answers.

[5] With each edit (unchecking or adding a new answer) I was prompted with regrade options.  Each time, I selected "only give points to the *correct* answer."

[6] Upon re-grading, *everyone* received 0 points b/c of course no one had selected an answer that was never previously an option.

[7] In my external spreadsheet, I simply reduce the overall points possible.  NOTE: the students still see this out of the original quiz total and "freak out" a little bit despite the fact that I tell them *in class* (and through a Canvas announcement) what I have done and that the point total is lower.  However, at least I get the correct student scores if not the correct percentage scores.

[Benjamin6]

Although there is not a way to delete questions from a quiz students have already taken, in a New Quiz you can regrade the quiz to exclude those questions from the points total relatively easily (although the existing the help pages don't make this clear).

In New Quizzes it is possible to adjust point values for questions (or to assign zero points to a question that was mistakenly posed) after students have already taken a quiz. Just follow the instructions for Regrading a New Quiz. Note that although you initially adjust the score on a single student's quiz in Speedgrader (and not in the Build section of the New Quiz), the Regrade function can update the point value for all students.

I needed to exclude some invalid questions from a New Quiz students had already taken. In order to do that, you can assign zero points to the bad question(s) in Speedgrader and Regrade, choosing the option to give students full credit for the question regardless of their answer. Canvas will recalculate both the individual student grades and the total points for the quiz (the total points assigned to the quiz in Assignments and Gradebook remains the same, but the individual student scores are properly adjusted based on the percentage score of the regraded quiz).

Incidentally, this was useful to me to exclude some questions whose uploaded images didn't render in Lockdown Browser when those questions were imported from a Classic Quiz to a New Quiz using the Migrate function. Tech support confirmed this is currently a bug in Lockdown Browser and/or Canvas when using the Migrate function on Classic Quizzes with rich content (i.e., image files). A workaround is to put all the questions from a Classic question bank into a Classic Quiz, export and download that quiz as a QTI file, then create a New Quiz by uploading and importing the QTI file. The imported images will then correctly render in Lockdown Browser. Hopefully the Migrate bug is fixed soon.

[StephenGregory]

This is incredibly counterintuitive. You can set the marks assigned for a question to zero, but instead of then realising that the quiz is out of 9 instead of 10, Canvas decides that I want to multiply all my marks by 1.1 and keep it out of 10?!

I can't imagine ever wanting that behaviour, so at most that should be an option. Please let us just remove bad questions.

I just don't understand why it is categorised as an academic integrity issue to alter quizzes. It would be an academic integrity issue NOT to alter the marks for a quiz that you have discovered has an unfair question in it. No-one has a perfect record in setting quizzes!