JeffCampbell
Community Coach
Community Coach

This functionality is already present in both Classic and New Quizzes. I am going to explain it using New Quizzes, but if you look up "Question Banks," you will find resources in Canvas's help pages for Classic Quizzes. The concept is the same, the steps to use it are different.

In New Quizzes, it will require that you have an Item Bank set up with questions already in the bank first. Then, when adding a question in Build mode, you will be prompted to select a question type. In the upper right corner of that popup is an icon that looks similar to a file folder. Click on that to pull up a menu to select an item bank. At the top of the bank, select the button that says +All/Random. This will load a spot into your quiz. Close the Item Bank side panel and click on that spot that was added. You will see an option to choose all questions or a random set of questions. If you choose random, it will expand and let you choose how many questions to pull from the bank and the point value.

Do this procedure for whichever item banks you want to use. When you assign the quiz to students, it will randomly pull questions from the bank(s) you have used in your quiz for each student. The more questions in your item bank, the more random each quiz becomes.

For best practices, I usually suggest that narrow topic item banks are better than wide topic banks. The example I often use is math related. If a teacher is wanting to evaluate solving for volume, then they would not want to use questions that evaluate perimeter. An item bank with a bunch of varying volume questions helps increase the validity and reliability of the results. Another teacher once told a group of us that he would try to add at least one question a week to an item bank. Over time, his banks had a bunch of questions to pull from when building an assessment.

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