Random essay prompts in New Quizzes

[david_white]

I am newly migrated to New Quizzes, and am struggling to work with randomizing essay prompts.

In Classic, I had Question Banks for each group of essays, and the individual prompts would be text blocks.  I would then have Canvas randomly pull X prompts from the pool and then use a blank Essay question as the writing space --otherwise, the students would freak about seeing multiple essays when they only had to do one (since Essay questions each came with their own text-reply box). 

So for example, the Exam One Essay Bank would have four questions, each displaying as a text block:

1. What is your name?
2. What is your quest?
3. What is your favorite color?
4. What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

And on Exam One we'd have Canvas pick three at random and then follow them with a single text-reply box with "Please record your response to one of the prompts here."  Pretty simple, no confusion about having to respond to each one, etc.

However (migration issues aside), I find I can't do that in New Quizzes.  Random essays still come each with their own text-reply box (and they WILL try to answer each one, instructions or not), and Item Banks don't seem to recognize Text Blocks as questions, so when I try to create an Item Bank full of random text blocks, it shows as empty. 

My workaround is to create Essay questions with multiple prompts and specific instructions, i.e. "Of these, pick ONE and record your response below.  But that seems cumbersome, particularly with larger numbers of potential prompts.   Am I going about this all wrong?  Is there a short-cut or "you need to toggle X and Y before trying this" procedure that I'm missing?

[RebeccaMoulder]

@david_white Are these African or European swallows? 🙂

If you want Canvas to randomly assign X number of Essay questions, you should create a new Item Bank with all the Essay questions first, then when adding a new question to the quiz, select the Item Bank option, click All/Random, and then after closing the item bank, click to Edit the question. Select Randomly select questions, choose the number of questions you want pulled from the bank, and set the point value. If there are three Essay questions in the bank, Canvas can randomly pull one to three questions from the bank for each student.

The trickier scenario is when you want students to be able to choose which prompt to answer. In that case, I've either done what you suggested--to put all the prompts into the same Essay question and say "Pick ONE"--or put each prompt into its own Essay question and told students just to answer ONE. Since the grading needs to be done manually anyway, I can fudge the points so that only one question has points and students aren't penalized for not answering each question, but this method is definitely more fraught since it's easier for students to assume they need to answer multiple questions. I usually use the first method of putting the prompts together in a single question. 

[david_white]

Yeah, there's the issue.  Random essays are easy, but the students will try to answer every single one that shows up (because there's a text-entry box, and obviously that means it must be done).  I can put the instructions in big bold letters and they will still do it.   

Doing three prompts on the Study Guide is easy, since then if I say "two of these will show up at random, and of those two you will select your favorite," then I just make three essay questions with AB/AC/BC as the combinations.  But if I want to do four or five (and randomly pick more than two for choice) then it gets onerous.  I mean, I could use an AI to arrange the prompts so that I could create an Item Bank of essay questions with ABC/ABD/ABE/BCD/BCE/BDE/CDE/ACD/ACE/ADE, etc.  but again, onerous, and that only works well if I have them select just one topic.  If it's "here's four of the five at random, pick your favorite two" then they have to put both essays in the same reply box --not desirable.