Copy questions within same question bank

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Right now you can copy questions from one question bank from to another question bank but you cannot copy a question within the same question bank.  Often you want to copy a question to the same bank so that you can edit it to make slight variations of the same question. Right now, to do this, I have to make a fake 2nd bank, copy the question over to the second bank and then copy it back to the original bank.  This is beyond silly and it should be a trivial thing to fix by the programmers.

22 Comments
ronmarx
Community Contributor

This is the type of full-featured versatility we'd love to see throughout Canvas. Thank you for parsing this general feature enhancement into two separate ideas.

ben_guido
Community Novice

Yeah, this is one of those little annoyances that I keep running into. I have to have a special "copy" bank just to edit questions to populate a set of similar questions for a given bank.

siouxgeonz
Community Contributor

I'm coming back after a summer break from Canvas... making things in D2L where "Save and Copy" is a one click option for when I want to have lots of very similar math questions.   I was looking for updates on quizzes and... looks like I've found 'em  -- "Not yet..."

dnolan2
Community Novice

This is one of the very few items that are available in Blackboard but not Canvas.  I have a hard time figuring out why Canvas does not include this feature -- copying a question to create a related question is really a needed feature.

ericwerth
Community Explorer

This would be a great feature.  I just worked with a faculty member who would like to have a handful of question variations that may be brought into a quiz so if students are taking a quiz they are less likely to have exactly the same question (Chemistry calculations in this case) to reduce the chance of cheating.  It would save a lot of time to be able to copy a question and change a few elements in this situation, as the request states.

cholling
Community Champion

Wouldn't an almost duplicate question within the same bank result in at least some students receiving both questions in a test when to test their knowledge adequately you would want one of the almost duplicates then others from the bank?

ericwerth
Community Explorer

I can't speak for everyone, but in the case I just had the faculty would want a series of questions where students could be given a certain # of grams of an element and need to calculate the number of atoms present in that sample.  Here the faculty foresees making a bank of these questions where either the grams or element is changed, and then being able to choose if students need to answer just one of these questions on the quiz or multiple questions of a similar type. I can see the same type of situation arising in math classes and other science classes.

cxy11
Community Novice

The way I use it is similar questions in a question bank is that when I actually make the quiz, I make a problem group with 4 or 5 similar problems from the question bank for each question the student gets on the quiz. Canvas then randomly chooses one problem from each group for each question the student gets assign on the quiz.

cholling
Community Champion

Thanks for the additional information,  @cxy11 ‌ and ericwerth

ericwerth
Community Explorer

No problem cholling . . . it was a good question!