Create 2 way link between quiz questions and the question bank.

(2)

Create 2 way link between quiz questions and the bank.  If you change a question in the bank or the quiz it will automatically change all questions linked to it in all quizzes and banks.  The quizzes have to be unpublished, and once the link is severed it can never be restored.  Wouldn't it be nice if I changed or fixed a question and then it automatically updated all the quizzes that involve that question as long as they are not published.  If they are published, a pop up message could say are you sure you want to over ride questions in "quiz 1" because it could possibly change students' quiz scores.  This would be great.

 

🔎 This idea has been archived. While this idea isn't open for comments, it is an important part of Instructure’s idea conversations and development process. Contributions like this are valuable as Instructure prioritizes work on new or existing features.

18 Comments
snugent
Community Champion

Yes! Yes! Yes! This request in the old community had nearly three hundred votes and numerous comments. This is absolute must! It is extremely difficult to manage questions in the question banks because there is no link.

george_joeckel
Community Novice

I assume that this would also resolve the bug where the link between a Quiz Question Group and a Question Bank is broken by the export/import process:

Screen Shot 2015-05-08 at 8.25.43 AM.png

Yes, the Question Bank can be relinked with a series of clicks, but when you have 30 to 50 mini Quizzes in a course....

ejackson
Community Champion

A link between quizzes and question banks is extremely important! It is so confusing and time-consuming when you need to correct a quiz question in more than one place, and it is also a good way to make mistakes if (when!) you forget to correct it in one place.

For example, in our mandatory Student Orientation, we have a "Checkpoint" quiz at the end of each Module, and a comprehensive Final Review at the end of the Orientation course which randomly draws questions from each of the previous Module's Checkpoint quizzes. If I need to correct an error in a question, I need to make sure and remember to not only correct it in the Checkpoint where it is located, but also the Question Bank AND the Final Review as well. And, I need to make sure that the corrections in each place matches exactly. Confusing, frustrating, annoying....... and so on.

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hi George,

I may be wrong but I believe that is a limitation of the IMS protocol itself so changing this in Canvas probably would not change how question banks are handled during import/export, at least not in moving content between Canvas and another system.

george_joeckel
Community Novice

Hi Scott,

My use case was for reusing Quizzes connected to a Question Bank from one course to another.

I did some testing this morning with the "Copy this Course" feature and it works for my use case--thanks!

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Cool.  Smiley Happy

jsparks
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Out of curiosity, would you all see this as a benefit of quizzes only, or should we look into this as a part of functionality for Commons? I could see both side of this, and would like for your input on this. What do you all think?

Jason

kona
Community Champion

Deactivated user​, I think you are exactly correct that this needs to be considered along with Commons. If I want to change a question in my question bank it would be great to have the option to update it on a quiz and/or Commons. I wouldn't want it tied together, but the option to pick which (or both) that get updated. In my mind I see it being a checkbox option when you go to save a question in a question bank (after editing it) and people could check the box if they want the question updated in Quizzes and a separate box for updating it in Commons.

eric_pasion
Community Novice

Editing questions is a super common occurrence, and the fact changes made to questions don't get pushed to the question banks have made quizzes very frustrating for many of our professors.  Perhaps we don't automatically link all questions to a question in the banks, but perhaps we have a way to "Push" questions into a question bank.  (If you do this, give a option to "Push" all questions fro a quiz into a new question bank)  The "Unfiled" bank can get just really hard to organize once you get over 200 questions.  (And I have seen a 2000 question bank before.)

dhughes
Community Novice

Wanted to chime in and add my support for creating links between questions in a quiz and the test banks.  Here are some use scenarios where this wuld help us out:

1.  Since quiz questions can not be previewed from within the test bank area we have to put them into a dummy quiz to verify they display and function properly.  This is convenient to make changes to them right there and retest them.  But of course that doesn't fix them in the test bank.

2.  We use the same question within a test bank in multiple quizzes: course pretest, practice ungraded section quiz, section exam, final exam.  And when you consider we build a template course as a "golden master" and then use that to import into each new section of the course we offer, once an error in a question is identified it is a time consuming and frustrating process to root it out of all its iterations.

Ideally for us when you created a quiz question you could select whether you wanted it linked to the test bank or not.  I think it would be great to have that option to leave them unlinked in some situations.  But for us the option to have linked questions is important.  Additionally it would be nice if two types of test banks could be created to hold those questions - those that are only within a specific course and those that are independent of a specific course, maybe exportable/hostable in Amazon S3?  This would allow us to have a single question from a test bank used in multiple course shells and a change one place could change them all.

And on the topic of linked questions related to later changes.  Maybe it would be simpler to have changes made in a specific quiz stay unlinked and only effect that question in that local usage, and if the change was made in the test bank it would be linked out to all linked instances of that question.

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Thanks, Dwight.

Specific examples and use cases are very helpful.

jsparks
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

This is very much akin to the other idea " modifiedtitle="true" title="Question banks. This is not something we will be able to actively develop in the next six months; however, the request is not un-heard. As we being to explore significant updates to the quizzes engine as a whole, we will look at this as a feature enhancement.

More to come!

Jason

christopher_bar
Community Novice

We would like this also!

ccarriga
Community Novice

I just put in a new feature request that linked question banks automatically update to any quizzes that are using them.  It sounds like the same basic idea that was posted here a year & a half ago.  I expect that when a question bank is LINKED that it should have a dynamic relationship with all the quizzes that link to it.  Changes made to questions in the question bank should be pulled in, not ghost versions of old questions as what happens currently. 

usypher
Community Novice

I typically use question banks for each chapter or unit, then combine them in pools for quizzes. I also typically have a lot more questions than needed so that different students get different combinations of questions (e.g., each student gets 20 questions out of a pool of 65 questions).

On occasion, accidentally the incorrect answer option was marked as correct (mostly due to poor layout design -- that's another issue) by the person inputting the quiz questions. If I later want to regrade completed quizzes, I can't. Regrading quizzes does not work for quizzes that use pools in this way. The "workaround" is lengthy and prone to human error. First I need to download the student analysis. Then I need to find the correct question (most of the question text is hidden in the Excel column view). Then I need to sort all quiz attempts by answer for that question. Then I need to manually add a point to the point total for each student who chose the actual correct answer (not everybody had that question, and not everybody who had it chose the actually correct answer but earned zero points for it). Yes, I can do the last bit (adding a point) with a formula in Excel, but it's still awkward. Then I need to (either manually or with an Excel formula) recalculate their overall points.

If you have more than one question you need to correct for this way, this is quite time consuming, especially when you have several hundred students in the course. If you allow students more than one attempt at the quiz and then retain the highest grade, the process starts to take "forever." After I regraded all questions and final grades, I now have to sort by student name and final grade, and then compare the higher grade for each student in the spreadsheet to the higher grade in the grade book and, if necessary, change the grade in the grade book. 

All just because you cannot automatically regrade when using pools.

Finally, I would like to combine the "regrade when using pools" option with some of the other regrade options. For example, marking two answers as correct, changing point values, etc.

melanie_sherwoo
Community Novice

Just gave a mid-term OMG!  So many errors, which I corrected, but what a mess!  The quizzes are pulling from the Question Bank.  Wondering what will happen when I copy the old quiz to another course will it republish with the correct questions being pulled? Having a difficult time figuring out a good workflow.  

ChandlWM
Community Contributor

I tend not to use quiz banks. Too many problems. I have found just using

"question groups" within quizzes is simpler. When you export quizzes, it

exports the quiz and not the banks if I am not mistaken. So a quiz linked

to a bank won't work in a new course unless the bank is transferred too.

Finding what works for your MO takes time, and then everything changes when

curriculum changes or your given a new course to teach.

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 3:17 PM melanie.sherwood@austinisd.org <

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: Archived

Thank you everyone for contributing to this idea! We acknowledge that this has been a long-standing thread in the Community, but because Intructure’s product teams are no longer developing new functionality for Classic Quizzes, which is scheduled to be deprecated 2024, we are archiving this idea. We hope that you continue to participate in the Community’s Idea Process!

The resources in the New Quizzes User Group should help you get started with using the New Quizzes in your courses. If you don't see the ability to enable New Quizzes in the settings area of one of your courses, please reach out to your local Canvas admin for information about its availability at your school.