Duplicating Quiz Questions

kona
Community Champion
14
45687

Below is a quick and easy way to duplicate quiz questions. Once copied these questions can be tweaked/adjusted as needed!

  1. Create the question you want to duplicate in your course Question Bank - How do I create a question bank in my course?
  2. Create your quiz and ADD the question from the question bank - How do I create a quiz by finding questions in a question bank? **Note, you don't want to link the question to the quiz you want to make sure and "add" it.
  3. Repeat step 2 above and add the question from the bank again to create a duplicate of the question. There will be a message by the question (in the bank) noting that, "This question is already on the quiz," but you can just ignore it and add the question.
  4. Repeat step 2 as many times as needed to get the desired number of copied quiz questions.
  5. Edit each copied quiz question as desired. Changing something on one of the questions does not change/impact the other copied questions - they are independent of each other.

Here's a quick video showing the above steps!

14 Comments
kwassink
Community Novice

This is a great suggestion. Any ideas on how to do the same thing in the question bank itself? I would like to create a large pool of questions and have individual quizzes select a subset of that pool for each quiz.

kona
Community Champion

 @kwassink , maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are wanting, but can’t you already do this with question groups? I know for me I have a couple of quizzes with well over 400 questions in the question bank and for my quiz students only get 10 random questions from this bank of questions. Is this what you are wanting or is it something else?

kwassink
Community Novice

I have question groups set up as well, but that's only the second part of what I'm trying to do. I first want to create a question bank that has a bunch of questions based on the same situation. I'd like to create multiple copies of the same question in the bank and then go edit the wording in each of the copies to make them individual. That way I only need to import the image once. Right now, the only way I have figured out to do this involved moving the question to a different question bank and then moving it back into the original bank multiple times. Seems like there should be a more efficient way, like an option to just duplicate the question.

kona
Community Champion

Ah, that makes sense and no, I don’t have a good way around that. 😞

mhegg1
Community Member

This is a great tip and very helpful. However, it would be great if the Canvas team added this functionality directly, especially because less savvy users are not going to find this tip. 

kona
Community Champion

I’m hoping that the new quizzing engine Canvas is working on will have this functionality!

prodes
Community Novice

I think I figured this out. If you create a second question bank you can copy/move questions from one bank to another. So I created a bank with my single question in it, and then copied that question multiple times into my target question bank (you need to select "keep a copy of the question in this bank"). Once I made enough copies, I edited them to make variations.

kona
Community Champion

Thank your for sharing this work around!

rweston
Community Novice

Hi Kona,

Which question bank are these questions in after duplicating them like this? Can you move these newly created questions back into the original question bank? If so how?


Best,


Robert

kona
Community Champion

Good question... They might be in the “unfiled” question bank for that course. Otherwise, what I would do to get them in the question bank is the following - Create a Question Bank from Already Created Quizzes. It’s a workaround,but it works!

r-mcdonald
Community Novice

Could somebody explain to me why this process is so clumsy? I create a question, why isn't there a way to duplicate it immediately? If I've created a question, why isn't there an option to add it to a question bank? Somebody please tell me I'm a dunderhead overlooking something obvious.

kona
Community Champion

 @r-mcdonald , all is this for the current version of quizzes in Canvas. Coming soon - and which some people are currently using - is Quizzes.Next, the new quizzing engine for Canvas. I believe the questions you have raised are addr seed with the new quizzing engine. To lean more check out the following - Quizzes.Next User Group

Hope this helps! Kona

r-mcdonald
Community Novice

Thanks. 

squiptryx
Community Member

How do I duplicate a quiz question that already exists in a quiz, but _not_ in a question bank? (Canvas won't let me create a question bank. I click on "add question bank", and type a name for the bank I want, but there's no "save" button, and clicking on any of the icons simply disappears the bank.) It seems utterly ridiculous that I am not allowed to copy (and then edit) questions while I'm writing a quiz.