Make "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses" Setting Do What It Says (or Say What It Does)

[Beth_Young]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Right now, we have the option to "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses," but that's not exactly what the setting does. I would like either for this setting to do what it says or for the label to be more accurate.

This setting doesn't let students see just their responses, it lets them see how their responses have been scored (see comment below). A more accurate label might be "Let Students See Their Graded Quiz Responses."  I was confused by this label originally and only learned the hard way what it does, and I believe others have been in this same situation.

Because this setting currently shows not just the students' responses, but also whether the responses are correct or not, students who see their own quiz results also learn the correct answer in these situations:

• when the question is true/false
• when the student has correctly answered a question
• when the general comments hint at or explain the correct answer

And for multiple choice and matching questions they have at least narrowed down the options. That's too much information to release to a class while the quiz is still available. Therefore, when I create a quiz, I don't check "Let Students See Their Quiz Responses." However, after I have finished grading the quiz, with this setting they can't see any comments on their graded questions, so I then need to return to the quiz settings and allow students to view their responses. Having to return to the settings screen is a huge pain in the neck and sometimes I forget to do it. When I forget to do it, students can't see the comments that I painstakingly enter on their quizzes, and then they (and I) get frustrated. And when the quiz is imported to a new course next semester, I have to remember to go back and change this setting again.

This problem was discussed in the old feature request forum Show Student Responses without Indicating if the Answer is Correct or Not : Help Center . (That idea was marked "done," but as far as I can determine, it is not done. I believe someone from Instructure confused this idea with something else.) Here is the suggestion from that forum, which includes a very good use case:

There are several related ideas currently open for voting right now, but none of them are the same.

Quiz Essays: Hold "General Answer Comment" Until Due Date or After Grading This idea would suppress the general comment but not the correct/incorrect flag on automatically graded questions.

Quiz Review: option to allow students to see their quiz responses & correct answers only after the d...  This is a different way to solve my use case and the original use case by Raechel Soicher, but it doesn't solve the problem of the misleading setting label.

Option to allow students to view questions after Quiz Due Date for limited time  This is a different way to solve the problem, but it doesn't address the misleading setting label. Also, for my purposes, it doesn't matter if the students can see the whole question. I just don't want them to see how their answers have been scored.

Release answers button for quizzes   This idea (I think) would solve the problem of having to change the quiz settings after a quiz is graded, but it doesn't address the use case posted to the old feature request forum.

My preference would be for the setting label to do what it says, but if that's not possible, please change the label to say what it does.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the:

• Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-28) 
• Canvas Release Notes (2019-02-16) .

[Stef_retired]

 @kfortin ​, based on the comment from Instructure, it's possible that this feature will be implemented as part of the larger Modern Quizzing Engine​ project. In the meantime, you might find this feature idea of interest (it's currently open for voting): " modifiedtitle="true" title="Quiz Review; Show Students Their Answers w/o Right/Wrong

[scottdennis]

As Stefanie correctly refers to, we are in the process of creating a new quizzing engine.  This project has a lot of exciting potential but just to be clear we can't guarantee at this point which individual features will make it into the finished project or first release. 

[mjohnston]

I agree wholeheartedly with this issue. I am not sure why this topic is archived? I think this is a very pertinent issue and many instructors actually believe what it says it is supposed to do. It has my vote!

[kona]

Deactivated user​, this idea was archived because it was responded to by Instructure (Canvas) with the following statement, "We are planning some updates to Canvas Quizzes.We will not likely release this idea as a product update in the next six months, but this is something we want to plan for in a future overhaul of the tool.  For now, we will archive this idea. Please know this is something we would like to deliver." This statement was made in September 2015 and is referencing the refactoring (complete makeover) of Quizzes in Canvas. For more information on this refactoring and to add your feedback please see this discussion - Canvas Studio: Modern Quizzing Engine​

[mjohnston]

Great to hear...

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[beth_mitchell]

This is an ESSENTIAL feature. This should not be in consideration, but should already be implemented. The only reason that I can gather that more people have not voted for this is because of how confusingly the item is worded in the quiz settings. Please remedy this as soon as possible.

Students should be able to see their correct answers, but for distance courses where quizzes are available for 24 hours, it is important they they can only see the quiz during the specified time that they are able to take it. Then, we should be able to specify a separate time when students can view their correct answers and any additional feedback (which should also be a separate setting). If students can see their responses after they take the quiz but while it is still open for other students to take, they can share all of the quiz questions with classmates before those classmates actually take it.

[jsparks]

As we are doing a lot of work in the new testing engine, we will not commit to work that updates this functionality in Canvas today; however, we will add language to the option to clarify that a question level "incorrect" indicator will be displayed if the student answers the questions incorrectly.

Jason

[kent_ratajeski]

Somehow Canvas has as having voted "down" for this issue.  Not sure how that happened as I am STRONGLY in favor of it. 

[scottdennis]

Hey Kent,

The other person who down voted this idea has a panda as their avatar so I can see where it might look like they are affiliated with Instructure but they are not actually.

Unfortunately there was a bug at work where randomly and very infrequently when someone would attempt up vote an idea, it would be recorded as a down vote.  The remedy was simple - users just needed to click the Up vote button a second time, that is if they noticed the Down vote, which a fair number did not.  We haven't seen any reports of this happening for about a month so we think the bug fix is holding.

In this case there were 118 up votes and two down recorded, which is a good part of the reason this feature is currently in development. For updates on the ongoing project to replace the current quiz engine, please follow Canvas Studio: Modern Quizzing Engine​.