Mechanism for assigning an assignment or exam question from a random pool

[willmoin]

Hi Folks, 

We're getting this request quite a bit, obviously this year more than ever here in the UK where we'd normally have exam rooms, invigilators etc. 

What we're finding is that staff want to digitise their paper exam papers, but in order to reduce collusion they want students to receive randomly selected questions from a larger pool. These tend to be fuller form free-text responses

The Quiz features of Canvas caters well for the randomisation, so staff have gravitated towards this approach. But they've also discovered some issues

1. no plagiarism detection/originality framework - even though you can view the test paper in Speedgrader. I think we might need to run off a bulk csv and run through Turnitin that way, depending upon question type.
2. Some of the staff want to give students the file upload option so that students can use Word (useful for equations etc.). But again the test paper does not render the submissions nicely in the Speedgrader, instead they have to download files to view, so no inline commenting.

I kind of think that there is kind of a gap here, staff wanting to be able to make greater use of the assignment features of Canvas, but want the facility to randomly assign component of the brief/exam paper.

I wondered if anybody else had come up with any novel approaches? Best, Will (Liverpool)

[RaeJobst-GU]

We are also looking at this. One solution is to have a Question Group (we are using Classic Quizzes) to randomly assign questions to students, and the questions include the link to the respective paper. The next step is that we want markers to be able to mark one paper - eg Marker A marks Paper A etc, but no automated way of doing that as all of the quizzes are the same value. 

This must be an issue for others - keen to hear ideas!