New Quizzes survey workaround and complete/incomplete

[jlubkinchavez]

I'm working in an environment where we use a lot of ungraded surveys and courses are large (200-500 enrollment). We've been transitioning to New Quizzes, and it's been bumpy. I've searched a lot in the community for posts or questions around workarounds to the lack of surveys, including the use of complete/incomplete grading, and surprisingly haven't come up with much, so thought I'd write about our experience in case it helps anyone out there.

Our hope was to make new quizzes worth 0 points and graded complete/incomplete, thinking that any submission would be entered in the gradebook as complete. Nope, in our experience and confirmed by Instructure Support, even if all questions are answered correctly, 0 points = 0% = incomplete (an X) in the gradebook. (Note: according to Support, grades for New Quizzes are calculated as (earned question pts / possible question pts) x quiz pt value)

Then we tried adding some points but keeping the grade type complete/incomplete. Responding with all correct answers did auto-grade as complete (assumes no essay questions which cannot be auto graded). But all incorrect auto-graded as incomplete (an X) in the gradebook. And something in the middle resulted in the submission icon in the gradebook, meaning it logged the quiz as submitted but not graded. (According to Support, processing partial credit for a complete/incomplete assessment is a limitation of LTI tools in Canvas; it's a known issue that they're working on but with no timeline.)

Manually grading these is painful. Though the "set default grade as" feature (How do I set a default grade for an assignment in the Gradebook?) can be of help sometimes, it is tedious and time-consuming to update grades for all students to document who submitted and who didn't.

The best workaround we could figure is to make the quiz worth at least one point, and put that point on (and only on) a question students will, by design, get "correct". If the point is on a multiple choice question, under options, you can check "Vary points by answer" and give all answer options the same maximum points. If the point is on a fill in the blank, you can set the text match to "close enough" and make the placeholder text and the Levenshtein Distance the maximum number of characters you want to allow; be sure to let students know the character limit in the instructions. All other questions should be worth 0 points.

This works out whether you use complete/incomplete or points as display grade.

As with all "surveys", be sure to "restrict student result view" in quiz settings so students don't see correct/incorrect answers or their points earned.

It's still just a workaround. I hope we get smoother, more robust options for surveys and questions without correct answers soon.

If you have other workarounds that don't require manual grading, would love to hear them!

[jlubkinchavez]

Those with large courses, this would also help. Vote it up! https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4939-set-a-default-grade-for-students-who 

[GideonWilliams]

I know it doesn't help the conversation, but with Office 365 in our school, we use Microsoft Forms (Google Forms does an equally impressive job for those with Google LTI). It is designed for surveys and it works. There are no workarounds or settings to adjust to make it function like a form.

Never liked the Canvas survey simply because creating a survey from a quiz tool is not the way to go about things. Which is a little ironic as anyone using Microsoft forms are finding when using their tool in to make a quiz!

I'd much prefer it if Canvas design a purpose built survey form.  Who knows, it could even work as a self assessment/evaluation tool seeing as it seems increasingly unlikely that we will be getting this https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5123-create-a-student-accessible-rubric-for-self-assessments 

[RebeccaMoulder]

Thanks for sharing your experience with ungraded complete/incomplete surveys in New Quizzes,  @jlubkinchavez . This is very helpful information.

[bsr]

Thank you both! Hard to believe after all these years we are still struggling to get working surveys in Canvas. 

[c_murphy]

My concern is that Classic Quizzes will be replaced with new quizzes and those of us who rely on the survey tool, weak as it is, will be left without one. Very annoying.

[Sylvia_Ami]

@jlubkinchavez Thank you for the way you explained how the overall number of points works. I was trying to think of a simple way to communicate that and your "formula" expression is perfect.

@c_murphy I know many colleges that are disappointed that anonymous surveys are not part of New Quizzes. We will have to use free versions of Survey Monkey or else MS or Google forms.

[Tasha_Biesinger]

For institutions that have an institutional license for Qualtrics, there is a Qualtrics integration built by Drieam that allows you to automatically award full points (or mark complete) in Canvas triggered by a student submitting the associated Qualtrics survey.

[akenady]

Thank you for mentioning this option! I'd love to learn more!! We have faculty who use surveys as triggers to accessing course content and as Complete/Incomplete gradebook values. 

[bb_mloder_ca]

This is one of those features we cannot live without at ASU. We use graded surveys for so many creative metacognition activities in high enrollment courses. I hope the graded surveys red icon is taken off the comparison sheet and updated to have graded surveys by the transition or we will have many upset professors at ASU. New Quizzes is making me very concerned... there's so much lacking and this big miss is a huge red flag, especially the way they describe the lack of consideration in the New Quizzes transition..."As the community has said, surveys are not quizzes and therefore will not be part of Quizzes work. Third-party tools can be connected to Canvas or Canvas may explore other options in the future. " Which community are they talking to or listening to? WOW. 

[embleton]

Any time we need to tell instructors "you have to redesign your course / assessment to fit into the software constraints" you know there is poor software design. Losing surveys is big. Loosing "groups" in quizzes is HUGE, losing course tied question banks (and making them user tied) is a complete game stopper for every LMS support service.

[chenshall]

@jlubkinchavez Thank you for detailing your experience so thoroughly! Two years later and we are experiencing the exact same issue: when students complete New Quizzes that are set to show complete/incomplete, they just show up as incomplete. Which obviously upsets students. There needs to be a better solution to this than just workarounds.

[kylecage0]

We have the same challenges in our clinical nurse practitioner program. The students have to complete evaluations of their clinical sites and their preceptors. These are "pass/no pass" assignments - not worth any points but required. They used to be PDF forms but we recently decided to use quizzes to make data aggregation easier. I created them as Classic Quizzes so they could be ungraded surveys. The problem, of course, is that Classic Quizzes won't allow us to change the grade display to complete/incomplete.

New Quizzes only works for graded quizzes, so we wouldn't be able to use the ungraded survey feature. But we would be able to have the grade display as complete/incomplete. 

Another option I'm considering is using an external tool like Microsoft Forms for all of these evaluations. However, since they are required parts of the course curriculum, we would need them to appear in the gradebook and preferably with the option for faculty to mark them as complete or incomplete.

I agree with @GideonWilliams that Canvas quizzes are probably just not the right way to do evaluations. However, the benefit of having them in the gradebook makes it so easy for faculty. I haven't looked into ways to make a Microsoft Form appear in the gradebook but it's worth investigating because Instructure is not going to do anything about the lack of surveying options in New Quizzes.

[ThomasDrieam]

Hi all,

As suggested by Tasha earlier in this thread, Drieam has a Qualtrics integration for Canvas that you can use to maintain the graded survey functionality in New Quizzes.

Feel free to send me a message in case you need more information.

-Thomas

[karenca]

There are so many great applications for graded surveys that educators have found as we have used Classic Quizzes, it would be a shame for Canvas to take that option away without providing it in New Quizzes.  Yes, improvements can and should be made to the survey tool, but at least it easily integrates with the grade-book.  Graded Surveys have value for so many educators, it needs to stay a part of Canvas (even if they just bring the same survey tool along and just change the quiz part of the tool.  New Quizzes has some great features that Classic Quizzes does not have and after you get used to creating and editing (building) in New Quizzes, it is not painful to use and simple enough to use both Classic and New.  The pain comes in turning Classic Quizzes that are working just fine into New Quizzes - No one wants to recreate quizzes from scratch and "fix" something that is not broken.  I know Canvas is trying to work on ways to convert Classic to New, but I am not sold that this process is simple or easy.  Why can't we keep and use both?  Is the Classic Quiz tool broken in some way?  My eighth grade students have gotten used to using both Classic and New and so have I.

On another note, I would love to have a graded survey type essay question as part of the many question types in New Quizzes.  Sometimes it is just not necessary to "grade" or evaluate everything a student has an opinion on or practices.  Points for completion is sometimes good enough.  I can easily check their answers if needed (or spot check as needed), but when I have 250 students taking a "quiz" (or doing a learning activity that happens to be in quiz form), I don't always want or need to view every opinion.  I am reading some of the "work-around" solutions others have offered, but how would I do that for 1 question?  I would really like to be able to have the option to let the students type in an answer and have it score a point value if they completed it.  Maybe with a min. word count option or must contain a certain word/s etc. This could have so many positive applications for teachers and students! 

Along with this idea, I would love to have the option when I do want to grade an essay question, to have it move to the top in speed grader so I don't have to scroll through the quiz to get to the essay question that I wanted at the end of the quiz for the students, but need at the top for me to grade faster and easier.  I am hoping that could be a simple request when we set up the quiz or begin to grade a quiz that only has one or two essay questions among the auto graded multiple choice and etc. questions.  

[mchild76]

I came across this workaround yesterday and could use the strategies you outlined to return the result I needed. Much appreciated!