Quiz preview going berserk?

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ryan_cook
Community Novice

I spent the afternoon carefully building an exam in the "quizzes" tool, but when I preview it various elements do not correspond to what I intended. For example, I gave names to each of my individual questions, grouping and numbering them by section, but in the preview view Canvas dumps my headers and renumbers everything 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. That's not ideal, but it's not a huge problem.

The bigger problem is that I created a question group to handle a section of essay questions in which I want students to choose three of four questions to which to respond. Maybe I don't understand how question groups work, but I had arranged and labeled everything neatly in the edit view, but preview not only erases my headings (as above); it also scrambles the order and drops questions. The order even seems to be rescrambled when I exit the preview view and go back into edit. Are these glitches (especially the question group issues), or am I misunderstanding how quizzes, or the preview function, work?

1 Solution
Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hi  @ryan_cook  Thank You for posting your question.  Unfortunately, I think you are misunderstanding how the classic Quizzes interface works in Canvas.

I spent the afternoon carefully building an exam in the "quizzes" tool, but when I preview it various elements do not correspond to what I intended. For example, I gave names to each of my individual questions, grouping and numbering them by section, but in the preview view Canvas dumps my headers and renumbers everything 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. That's not ideal, but it's not a huge problem.

Yup...this is just how Quizzes work.  You can re-name each of your questions all day long, but from the student side, they will see the actual question number.  I'm personally not huge fan of the labeling, either, but that's just me.  When we make the decision to enable New Quizzes (or when Instructure enables it for all of their customers), I think this won't be much of an issue any more.

The bigger problem is that I created a question group to handle a section of essay questions in which I want students to choose three of four questions to which to respond. Maybe I don't understand how question groups work, but I had arranged and labeled everything neatly in the edit view, but preview not only erases my headings (as above); it also scrambles the order and drops questions. The order even seems to be rescrambled when I exit the preview view and go back into edit. Are these glitches (especially the question group issues), or am I misunderstanding how quizzes, or the preview function, work?

When you create a question group, it's not so that your students have a free choice to pick "x" number of questions out of "y" number of questions to answer.  Rather, Canvas is picking those questions for you...randomly.  So, when you create the question group, you tell Canvas to pick five (or whatever number) question at random to display to students ... at whatever point value you want for each question.  Then, you place all the questions you want Canvas to pick from in that group (in this case, five or more questions).  So, the fact that it was dropping questions is actually "by design" because you told the question group to only pick a certain number of questions from the total number of questions populated in the question group.

I hope this helps to explain things a bit better for you, Ryan.  Stay safe, and be well.

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