Setting Up Online Exams

Setting Up Online Exams

Creating Canvas Quizzes

Canvas quizzes provide a seamless way to assess your students' learning within the Canvas environment. You can create a new quiz directly in Canvas, or — if you have a print exam that you would like to convert to online test — you may choose to  import questions from it.

Regardless of which creation method you choose, you may select from a variety of quiz types:graded quiz, practice quiz, graded survey, orungraded survey. 

The tabs below  provide additional information about the ways you can create Canvas quizzes.

How can I organize and structure my questions?

Once you've created a Canvas quiz,  you have a few options for organizing questions and adding them to your quiz.

Randomizing Questions

You can create a quiz using a question group. Question groups allow you to place multiple questions within a group for students to answer. You can choose the number of questions that should be answered from the group and how many points to assign each question. Creating a question group randomizes questions within a quiz.

You can add questions to your question group in several ways:

• Link to a question bank to reference all questions in a question bank
• Add an individual question to create your own questions from scratch
• Find questions to reference specific questions from a question bank

Note: If you need your questions to appear in a specific order, do not place quiz questions inside a question group.

Question Types

Whichever method of organization you choose, you can choose from a variety of question types to best meet your assessment needs.

You can also include images in any of your questions Links to an external site.. If you do this,  you'll need to make sure you secure your images Links to an external site. within a Canvas folder.

Canvas provides a help page Links to an external site. with more information about the various question types and how to add them to your quizzes. 

As you are creating your quiz, you'll need to think through some options that can impact the delivery and security of your test. Use the tabs below   to explore a few of the more common settings. 

If you'd like to learn more about the various quiz settings, Canvas provides an extensive user guide (Links to an external site.) that you may find helpful.

How do I make accommodations for students who need more time?

Some of your students may require special accommodations during quizzes. One common accommodation is to provide additional time for test-taking.

You can provide additional test time for individual students using the Moderate Quiz feature. Once you've created and published your quiz, click the Moderate This Quiz button in the top right corner of your screen.

On the Moderate Quiz page you can view the student progress  and the number of quiz attempts each student has taken. You can also manually unlock quiz attempts and grant students extra attempts or time.

A quiz must be published before you can moderate it.

What about students that need to take a makeup quiz later?

As you set up your quiz, carefully consider the testing window that you want to allow. The term "testing window" refers to the period time during which students may take your quiz. Canvas provides two different options within the testing window — the Due date and the Availability dates.

Use the Due date option to communicate to students the date by which the quiz must be taken in order to not be considered "late".  You may allow individual students to submit their quizzes later, if special circumstances require it. 

The Available Until date is much more firm. After this date has passed, the quiz will no longer be accessible. If a student needs to take a quiz once the Available Until date has passed, you will have to create an entirely new quiz.