Randomizing Canvas Quizzes Using Item Banks

Within Canvas quizzes, you can have quiz questions selected randomly from a larger bank of questions. There are several benefits to this approach and a few things to carefully consider.

Benefits of Item Banks

• Randomization: You can create quizzes that pull random questions from Item Banks. This helps in creating unique quizzes for each student, reducing the chances of unwanted student collaboration.

• Randomization (again!): You can create quizzes that pull random questions from Item Banks. If you allow multiple attempts on a quiz, this ensures the student gets a different set or order of questions each time. This works great for providing students with practice opportunities.

• Reusability: Questions stored in Item Banks can be reused across multiple quizzes and courses. This saves time and ensures consistency in assessments.

• Collaboration: Item Banks can be shared with colleagues, allowing for collaborative quiz creation and question sharing.

• Flexibility: Item Banks allow for easy editing and updating of questions. Any changes made to a question in the bank will automatically reflect in all quizzes using that question.

• Organization: Item Banks help you organize quiz questions efficiently. You can categorize questions by topic, difficulty, outcome, or any other criteria, making it easier to find and use them later.

Things to consider when using Item Banks

• Outcome Alignment: When creating a quiz that randomly draws questions from Item Banks, you want to ensure that all students are still being assessed on the same outcomes. You want to avoid cases where one student may get several questions on Learning Outcome A and another student gets several questions on Learning Outcome B. You can mitigate this by structuring Item Banks based on outcomes.

• Level of Difficulty: When creating a quiz that randomly draws questions from Item Banks, you want to ensure that all students are still being assessed at the same level of difficulty. You want to avoid cases where one student may get several knowledge-level questions, and another student gets several application-level questions. You can mitigate this by structuring Item Banks based on level of difficulty.

• Order of Questions: If you want your exam questions or topics to follow a certain progression, you’ll need to be mindful of this when creating the Item Banks and the exam. It can be done, but typically a randomly drawn quiz, ignores any progression.

• Points per Question: When drawing randomly from Item Banks, all questions must be worth the same number of points.

How to create and use Item Banks

Canvas has two different quiz engines: New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes. The process of using item banks is different between the engines. In Classic, they are called Question Banks instead of Item Banks.

New Quizzes: Item Banks

You can find a thorough tutorial of Item Banks within Canvas New Quizzes here: Canvas: Use Item Banks in Canvas New Quizzes.

If you are planning to share and collaborate on Item Banks with colleagues, please contact gmctl@usask.ca for additional support as the process and permissions are not straightforward.

Classic Quizzes: Question Banks

You can find a thorough tutorial of using Question Banks within Canvas Classic Quizzes here: Canvas: Create Quiz Using Questions from Question Bank.

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This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The image was shared by the Province of British Columbia via Flickr with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.