The Instructure Community will enter a read-only state on November 22, 2025 as we prepare to migrate to our new Community platform in early December. Read our blog post for more info about this change.
Found this content helpful? Log in or sign up to leave a like!
We have disabled access to Classic Quizzes for our entire school as we want them to use New Quizzes. However, they still have the option to create and edit Question Banks, which are no longer useful because they don't work with New Quizzes. This has led to the frustration of some teachers as they worked to create a few Question Banks only to find out they needed to be creating Item Banks. I have looked through settings, permissions, the question banks tab itself, feature options, etc. and I can't find a way to disable Question Banks. Is this even possible?
Side note: This is the first year our school has started using Canvas, so there are no Question Banks from previous years that we would need to be worried about staff losing access to.
What if faculty had question banks they brought over from other institutions?
i’ve been using Canvas for some years now as an instructor, and the New Quizzes have some issues. For example, I’ve written scripts to pull answers from Classic Quizzes via the Canvas API, put them into a .csv file, and allow far, far more efficient grading than is possible in the (incorrectly named) SpeedGrader. The New Quizzes API is still in development, and Q&A threads here strongly imply that what I did is impossible there. There are goals set in the roadmap, so I’m not saying this wouldn’t be a reasonable transition in the future when NQs hit full feature parity! But now is not the future, and the roadmap has a way to go.
(For example, the ability to import question banks sure seems like a key one now!)
Think carefully before disallowing instructors from using workarounds or existing tools, rather than setting New Quizzes as a default and allowing Classic Quizzes as a fallback. If you did that, those instructors could use the question banks they worked so hard on.
If they pulled this at my school, I’d be a little annoyed. (Read: apoplectic with rage!)
I know it’s generally considered rude, when someone asks “How do I do X?” to reply, StackOverflow-style, “Why are you doing X? Don’t do X.”
But that’s effectively what you’re doing to your faculty, so turnabout is fair play.
Hi @DustinWIthrow,
This doesn't seem to be possible, and is possibly an oversight at this point. I would agree that if Classic Quiz creation and use is disabled, that question banks should also be disabled since there's no way to actually use a question bank without Classic Quizzes. I'm hoping this is something Instructure will address at some point. I'm going to move this thread over to the New Quzizes area to hopefully get some visibility with the quiz product managers.
-Chris
Community helpTo interact with Panda Bot, our automated chatbot, you need to sign up or log in:
Sign inTo interact with Panda Bot, our automated chatbot, you need to sign up or log in:
Sign in