Why are the stimulus borders in New Quizzes so narrow?

[THEODOREBOORUM]

I have been using New Quizzes for years now.  Today the same new quiz looked different from last year.  The field in which the stimulus text is visible is extremely narrow in the student view.  The question field is correspondingly too wide.  My students could use it but it detracted from their experience and essentially made the assignment worse for no apparent reason.

How can I make this more readable?  The formatting is very poor and this is an issue for students with exceptionalities.

[tbaker-mc]

Not a resolution, but a workaround and hopefully a note for Instructure if they need to look into this...I would also recommend reaching out to your Canvas admin team and have them submit a ticket with Instructure directly (have them also reference this post so it can be tracked should other issues come up) as they would escalate the issue with their engineering team the more they get tickets like this.

Workaround
Instead of having the stimulus be on the left and the questions on the right, switch it to stimulus on top with questions below. We use the L/R option like you, so I don't want to change it for the program that uses it (thankfully don't need to worry about it today).

Note for Instructure or others with this issue
This narrow stimulus issue seems to only happen when the length and number of questions exceeds the height of the stimulus. Attached two screenshots for reference. This does NOT appear on the Build menu. Looks like the scroll window isn't generating for the "questions to the right" orientation.

[MitchellOsmond]

I recently had this same issue in a new quiz using the stimulus that we managed to solve. The quiz itself used a range of different question types, essay, MCQ, etc. I started systematically removing questions and what I found was the stimulus went back to normal size when I removed the 'categorisation' question type - it must need a specific width to function, and when paired with a stimulus it shrinks the stimulus to get the required space.

[tbaker-mc]

I'm surprised Instructure hasn't updated this discussion post to reflect the current status, but this is a known issue that the engineers are working on. Actually has nothing to do with the categorization question type, as it's happening with regular multiple choice questions -- looks more to be about how much space the questions take up in comparison to the stimulus itself, as the scroll window isn't generating. Their support team hasn't given an update on when this will be fixed, as it looks like there are other issues with New Quizzes right now as well (unlimited timing accommodations on timed quizzes).

[elisat]

We ran into this issue today, as well. I'm sorry to see that it is a known issue that hasn't been fixed.

[rachel_kenning]

End of September and we are still having this problem.

[Pete5484]

Same but saw there's an open issue for this: [OPEN] New Quiz Stimulus are being made too narrow... - Instructure Community - 658494

It's not just categorisation, it's essay questions... too. New Quizzes/Learnosity’s css is first creating a frame to hold the quiz that is max 79.5rem (1272px) regardless of screen size (perhaps understandable since long lines of text aren't easy to read if you do have a large screen).  Then, if the stimulus material is set to be at the side (rather than above) it ends up only using 25% of the column for the stimulus (less margins); perhaps they intended 50%, it looks like a relatively straightforward css. But there's no real tags to target to do this dynamically with js so we need Canvas to fix. Stimulus material at the top is not a suitable workaround for us.

@JoaoSilveira it would also be useful to be able to configure to use the 'full width of the page' rather than be limited to 79.6rem as an option for side displayed stimulus material (or generally). And perhaps to have the ability to have above question stimulus  material be able to continuously displayed with a dragable divider! 🙂

Example - stimulus presented 208px wideMax New Quiz Frame sizeStimulus size