New Quizzes vs. Classic Quizzes
- Christine Sandella
New Quizzes is a new Canvas assessment tool available alongside Canvas’ Classic Quizzes tool. Classic Quizzes is the default quizzing tool in all Canvas courses. However, instructors can enable the New Quizzes tool at the course-level.
Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes share many of the same features. However, the two quiz tools function rather differently. It's important to understand the differences between Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes, particularly if you are already a regular user of Classic Quizzes. For a more detailed comparison table of Classic and New Quiz features, please refer to the "New Quizzes Feature Comparison" document.
Choose a Quiz Engine
While New Quizzes offers helpful features, it is currently missing some functionality on which many faculty depend. When choosing a Quizzes tool, consider the following:
The tools for migrating Classic Quizzes with question banks to New Quizzes with items banks are still under development. If your quizzes make extensive use of item banks, embedded images or videos, or links to files stored in the Files tool, the recommendation is to wait to migrate your existing quizzes to New Quizzes until these tools are complete and fully tested.
If you will be building quizzes for a new course from scratch, and if you won't be hampered by the tool's current limitations, consider using New Quizzes. By building quizzes in the newer tool, you won't have to worry about migrating them later.
Even if you don't plan to use New Quizzes regularly, explore the tool in a practice site and perhaps use it for low- or no-stakes activities in regular courses. Getting familiar with the tool now will prepare you for the transition to New Quizzes.
Select a Quiz Engine When Creating a New Quiz
From the Quizzes page in your course site, click on +Quiz at the top-right corner.
A pop-up box will appear for you to Choose a Quiz Engine. From here, you can choose between New Quizzes or Classic Quizzes.
Classic Quizzes is the original quizzing tool that will eventually be phased out; however, prior to the phase out, you can still select Classic Quizzes when creating a new quiz.
New Quizzes is a quiz engine that integrates with Canvas and will eventually replace the classic quizzes functionality.
If you would like to save your quiz engine selection for future quizzes, check the box for Remember my choice for this course. To reset your selection, click the three-dot icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Quiz page, then select Reset quiz engine choice.
Click Submit to move forward with quiz creation.
New Quizzes Features
The following features are available in New Quizzes, but not in Classic Quizzes:
Duplication:
Duplicate a quiz
Duplicate a question in a quiz
Duplicate a question in an item bank
Grading, moderation, and feedback:
Filter student attempts by status, including show all, no attempts left, attempts in progress, submitted, auto-grading failed.
Give students accommodations, such as extra time or no time limit. These can be applied to all quizzes, not just the current quiz.
When regrading a question, award points for any submitted answer.
Delivers graded and ungraded quizzes in a manner more in line with Canvas Assignments.
More granular control over what information students can see when grades and feedback are released. For example, set visibility for points possible, points awarded, items and questions, student response, correct/incorrect indicator, correct answer with incorrect response and item feedback.
Item/question banks:
Share banks with specific users, courses, or the entire institution, and control the level of access when sharing (edit or view only).
Sort, filter, and search all banks owned by and/or shared with you.
Add tags to questions in item banks.
Add any quiz question to one or more item banks.
View the last date a bank was used.
Import/export:
Import a QTI file directly into a quiz.
Outcomes:
Align one or more outcomes with an entire quiz.
Align one or more outcomes with individual questions.
View the quiz outcomes results in the Outcomes Analysis report.
Printing options:
Print a blank quiz for students to take with pencil and paper.
Print an answer key.
Print an auto-graded student attempt.
Question authoring:
For essay questions, enable or disable the rich content error, word count, enable/disable word limit, and spell check, and add notes for grading.
For file upload questions, restrict file types and number of files.
For fill-in-the-blank questions, choose from a variety of matching options, including contains, close enough, regular expression match, exact match, and specify correct answers.
For formula questions, when generating possible solutions, display answers in scientific notation.
For matching and multiple answer questions, choose partial credit or exact match (all-or-nothing) grading.
For multiple choice questions with shuffled answers, lock the location of specific answers (for example, all of the above, none of the above) and vary points by answer.
For numeric questions, specify margin of error as a percent or absolute; specify precision by decimal places or significant digits.
Question types:
Categorization: Requires students to assign a list of items to a predefined list of categories
Hot spot: Requires students to point to a designated region in an uploaded image.
Ordering: Requires students to arrange a list of items according to your instructions (for example, chronological order, simple to complex, etc.).
Stimulus: Requires students to answer multiple questions related to a single block of content consisting of rich text and/or media.
Word bank: This FITB variant requires students to draw words from a pre-existing bank of possible answers to fill in the blanks.
Report data:
Cronbach's Alpha calculation.
Average score for each question.
Performance by quintile graph for each question (graph actually shows score distribution).
Settings:
Shuffle questions globally (for the entire quiz).
For quizzes with multiple attempts, require a waiting period between attempts.
Assign a different point value for the associated gradebook item than the total possible points in the quiz; points earned on quiz are converted to a percentage value which is multiplied by the points possible in the assignment/gradebook item.
Allow or disallow calculator and choose from basic or scientific calculator when allowed.
Build on last attempt; for quizzes with multiple attempts, students are only asked to answer questions that answered incorrectly in previous attempt.
Require a waiting period between attempts.
New Quizzes Limitations and Missing Features
New quizzes is still in development as Instructure addresses known issues and missing features. To track the status of these issues visit New Quizzes: Missing Features and Known Issues . This resource includes Instructure's tentative delivery date as specified in the New Quizzes Roadmap . Currently, Classic and New Quizzes question banks are separate and cannot be shared.