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Law School Canvas Best Practices Guide

Guide for using Canvas for your class.

Quizzes FAQ/Troubleshooting

Q: I want to randomize the order of my questions, but I still want to ensure some questions come before others. How can I accomplish this?

A: There are two approaches to this. If you want to create sections of questions where each section has a randomized order, you can create a separate question group for each section. Then you add questions to the appropriate section's question group. Questions will then be randomly selected from the sections, but questions in Section 1 will appear before Section 2 and so on.

 If you are looking to ensure that some questions appear at a certain spot in the quiz (e.g. question 3 is always the same) you can use "+ New Question" and create the question and then create question groups that surround this question. For our example that would mean you'd have a question group that picks 2 questions, then use "+New Question" for question 3, and then another question group for the rest of the questions.

Q: I have a fact pattern that is used for several questions and I don't want to rewrite the fact pattern for every question what can I do?

A: This is an opportune time to use the "Text (No Question)" question type. This 'question' is worth zero points so you can place the fact pattern in such a question and then have either the corresponding questions follow either in a specific order or in a question group. 

Q: Can I set a word limit for Essay question responses?

A: At this time Canvas Quizzes do not allow for that.

Q: My Question exceeds the character limit, but I can not shorten it any more, what should I do to still have this question in my quiz?

A: There are two workarounds currently.

  1. Take screenshots of the question and upload them into the text editor for the question. This allows the question to still be embedded within the quiz, which makes it useful when using proctoring software that blocks opening new tabs. You should put the question text that appears in the screenshot in the Alt text box for the picture.
  2. Upload the question as a document (e.g. Word, Gdoc, PDF, ect.). This will provide a link in the question text that will open the document in a new tab. Students can switch between the tabs to answer the question. This is less work, but doesn't work with proctoring software.