Why do Question IDs change?

home777
Community Novice

I have a problem and I'm hoping some of the experts here might have some insight that helps us unscramble things.

Background: We have a course that uses a summative final exam. This exam has a total of three versions. Some of these questions in the 2nd and 3rd exams were created from slightly modifying the stems or answer choices of the first exam. The theory is a student who needs to retake the exam after 180 days should not be able to see the same questions again. Therefore, with a 60 question exam, we have a total of 180 questions, and permit a maximum of two retakes. In theory, a student will have a 33% chance of seeing a repeated question in a future exam, but will not be presented with the exact same questions.

I am trying to come up with an elegant way to manage the questions from these three exams. Whenever a question from the first exam was used to create clones that are used as questions in versions 2 & 3, these questions need to be kept separate. If not, a student could encounter these nearly identical "sibling questions" during one exam testing session.

The problem we're having is that when a course is duplicated in Canvas (for example, creating a Summer Semester course by cloning the Spring Semester), the Question ID numbers assigned to each question change and become different. My understanding is that in Blackboard or other similar LMSes, a static identifier can be associated with these questions.

I have thought about other ways around this, like managing questions in Question Banks at the Account level, and also of having a Sandbox course that contains the master questions. Each of these have some significant downsides. What would elegantly solve the problem is an unchanging question identifier that can be used to evaluate and analyze each item within an assessment.

Does anyone have experience assigning a unique identifier to a question, or how do you work around this problem?

Stumped,

Russ

0 Likes