Shuffling Questions and Answer Options in Canvas Quizzes

Two strategies you can use to make unpermitted sharing between students more difficult during digital assessments is to have Canvas shuffle the order of quiz questions from student-to-student and/or shuffle the order of answer options from student-to-student on certain question types, such as multiple choice. These strategies used in conjunction with having the questions display one-at-a-time (See guides: New Quizzes: Display One Question at a Time or Classic Quizzes) can make a big difference.

• The strategies described in this article result in all students receiving the same set of questions, but in different orders.
• You can use banks of questions to have each student receive a different subset of questions. This further increases exam security.

New Quizzes

You can easily shuffle the order of questions within the Settings section when Building your quiz.

If you have quiz questions where certain answer options must stay in a certain place, you can lock the position of an answer choice (e.g., none of the above). To see the lock button, you must first enable “Shuffle Choices” within the specific question.

If you have certain sets of questions that should remain together, explore using the Stimulus question type. For example, you might want to do this if you have one case study that is used for three questions.

Classic Quizzes

You can easily shuffle answer choices on the main quiz settings page. However, there is no option to lock the location of certain answer options (e.g., None of the above).

Shuffling the order of questions in Classic Quizzes requires the use of a Question Bank.

Implementing strategies such as shuffling the order of quiz questions and answer options, along with displaying questions one at a time, can significantly enhance the security of digital assessments. By ensuring that each student encounters the same questions in a different sequence, educators can effectively minimize the risk of unpermitted sharing between students.

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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.