When it comes to graded quizzes offered via your Canvas course site, we recommend the following for creating, administering, and analyzing your assessments. These items are particularly important for high-stakes assessments, such as midterm or final exams.
Use the links below to jump down to the information you need:
Creating an assessment
Administering an assessment
After the assessment has been taken
There are a number of different question types that you can use in Canvas. You can also choose to draw questions from a question bank and use random blocks of questions (called question groups in Canvas).
When deciding how to set up your quiz questions, please keep in mind the following caveats:
The best option for administering Canvas assessments in-person is to have TAs or other instructors serve as proctors in your classroom during the assessment. If in-person proctoring isn’t an option for you or any of your students, you may consider using the Honorlock online proctoring service which can be enabled on any exam in Canvas. If there is a technical glitch and a student gets locked out of their exam and they need to get back in, you can give an additional attempt to that student by using the Moderate Quiz feature.
Once the assessment is open to students, please avoid editing the assessment until the due date passes. Canvas allows you to edit the assessment while an assessment is in progress, but it can cause grading errors. In one instance, students were served the wrong version of the test entirely. If you do need to make an urgent fix, make sure to save the changes and confirm that the changes took effect while under student view.
Speedgrader is Canvas's inline grading tool that allows you to view individual students' attempts and adjust points as needed. You can easily manually grade essay questions via SpeedGrader. You can also offer students "fudge points" if you find an unfair question in your assessment's item analysis and wish to cancel out the point value of that question. Fudge points can also be used to offer a student extra credit on an assessment. If you need to edit a multiple choice, true/false, or multiple answer question and it is not tied to a question bank, you may be able to edit the quiz question and trigger an automatic regrade of that question for all students. However, we do not recommend relying on this feature. We strongly recommend using Speedgrader to verify that a regrade has been successfully applied to your students' quiz submissions. Learn more about Canvas's regrade option.
Canvas offers an item analysis option so that you can analyze assessment performance and question quality. For more information, see How do I run an Item Analysis on my Canvas Exam?.
While this tool can be very useful, it also has some limitations: Quiz statistics will only generate for quizzes with 100 or fewer unique questions, or 1,000 total attempts. For example, a quiz with 200 questions will not generate quiz statistics, but a quiz with 75 questions will generate quiz statistics until the quiz has reached 1,000 attempts. Results greater than these maximum values can be viewed by downloading the Student Analysis report and viewing the CSV file in Excel.
For more information, see Canvas's Quiz Item Analysis documentation.