Quercus Quizzes

Classic Quizzes

Use Quercus Classic Quizzes to create a variety of question types to test your students’ learning in an exam format. There are also options to create formative and self-assessments by creating practice quizzes and surveys. There are four types of quizzes available in Quercus:

• Graded Quiz: A column is automatically created in the Gradebook for a graded quiz. After a student takes a graded quiz, certain question types will be automatically graded.
• Practice Quiz: Use practice quiz as a learning tool to help students see how well they understand the course material. Students do not receive a grade for practice quizzes, even though the quiz results display the number of points earned in the quiz.
• Graded Survey: A graded survey allows the instructor to give students points for completing the survey, but it does not allow the survey to be graded for right or wrong answers. Graded surveys have the option to be anonymous.
• Ungraded Surveys: An ungraded survey allows you to get opinions or other information from your students, but students do not receive a grade for their responses. Ungraded surveys can be anonymous.

You can view all your quizzes in your course on the Quizzes page. You can also add quizzes and modify quiz settings on the Quizzes page.

In order to create a new Quiz, click the Add Quiz button.

When you create a quiz, you have a variety of options (Links to an external site.) to choose from within a quiz.

In the Details tab, you can use the Rich Content Editor to add instructions for your quiz.  The Office 365 integration displays the OneDrive icon in the Rich Content Editor in Quizzes and allows users to create a hyperlink to OneDrive files directly in the Rich Content Editor.  (Links to an external site.) You can also add links, files , and images  to the Quiz instructions using the content selector.

Once you have set up the settings for your quiz, click the Questions tab to create the quiz questions and points. You can create individual quiz questions (Links to an external site.), or find questions in a question bank (Links to an external site.). You can also create a question group  (Links to an external site.)to randomize quiz questions.

Individual questions can be added to a Question Group. Alternatively, you can link the Question Group to a Question Bank (Links to an external site.).

You can view student quiz results within each quiz in your course by viewing the quiz results (Links to an external site.) page or moderating the quiz (Links to an external site.). When moderating the quiz, you can view the progress of student submissions and view the number of quiz attempts each has taken. You can also grant students extra attempts, grant extra time for timed quizzes, and manually unlock quiz attempts.  As a moderator, you cannot remove student submissions.

If you are creating Multiple Choice questions and quizzes, you may find the following CTSI tips sheets helpful: Multiple Choice Question and Quiz Tips (Links to an external site)  and Multiple Choice Quercus Quiz Analysis Reports (Links to an external site.).

Note about Quercus (Canvas) System Performance:

For optimum course performance in the Quercus (Canvas) interface, quiz statistics will only generate for quizzes with 100 or fewer unique questions or 1,000 total attempts. For instance, a quiz with 200 questions will not generate quiz statistics. However, a quiz with 75 questions will generate quiz statistics until the quiz has reached 1000 attempts. Results greater than these maximum values can be viewed by downloading the Student Analysis report and viewing the CSV file.

New Quizzes vs.
Classic Quizzes

New Quizzes Feature Comparison Chart

New Quizzes offers some new features and question types, but does not currently have some of the features of the original Classic Quizzes tool.  We recommend using Classic Quizzes unless a feature you require is only available in New Quizzes.

New Quizzes offers some features that are not available in the Classic Quizzes tool. For example, in New Quizzes, you can:

• set a waiting period between quiz attempts for quizzes with multiple attempts
• search content within an item bank
• use new questions types, including:
  • stimulus to associate a group of questions with a block of content, and
  • hotspot  to upload images and have students identify a specific area in that image.

Eventually, Instructure will retire the original Canvas Classic Quizzes tool.  At that time, Classic Quizzes will be removed from Quercus and New Quizzes will remain as the only quizzing tool.

Instructors should use Classic Quizzes   to deliver high-stakes assessment such as mid-terms and final examinations.

Enabling New Quizzes

To enable New Quizzes in your Quercus course:

1. Click on Settings in the Course Navigation menu

2. On the Feature Options tab, click the New Quizzes slider to ON.

The slider will be green when activated.

Create a New Quizzes Assessment

New Quizzes assessments display a solid icon of a rocket [1] while Classic Quizzes assessments display an outline of a rocket [2].

To create a New Quizzes assessment:

1. 1. In Course Navigation, click the Quizzes link.
   2. Click the Add Quiz button.
   3. Click New Quizzes, when prompted to select a Quiz engine.
   4. Click Submit.
   5. Edit Assessment Details,including:
      • Assignment Name
      • Total points possible
      • Assignment Group
      • How grade is displayed to students, by selecting an option from the Display Grade as menu
      • Remove  assessment from final grade calculations, if appropriate, by clicking the Do not count this assignment towards the final grade checkbox
   6. Assign Assessment:
      •  Use the Assign To field to  select who will be required to take the assessment (can be assigned to Everyone, individual students or sections)
      • Use the Due field to select the assessment due date.
      • Use the Available From and Until fields to  select the availability dates for the assessment.

7. Click Save to save the assessment details (Note: it is recommended to NOT click Save and Publish until the assessment has been built and its settings defined)

Features Not Yet Available in New Quizzes

Some features that are available in the Quizzes tool are not currently available in New Quizzes. However, they may be added in the future. For example:

Surveys 

New Quizzes does not have an option to create surveys, either graded and ungraded. However, it is possible to create an assessment without a point value.

Rich Content Editor

The New Quizzes Rich Content Editor for authoring questions and submitting responses to short answer/essay questions does NOT yet offer some features that are available in the Classic Quizzes Rich Content Editor, including:

1. Content Selector Sidebar
2. Accessibility Checker
3. HTML Editor
4. Media Recorder

A screenshot of the New Quizzes Rich Content Editor is available below:

To learn more about New Quizzes and how it compares with the existing  Classic Quizzes tool, please see the following documents:

• FAQ: New Quizzes
• New Quizzes Feature Comparison 
• Canvas New Quizzes Feature Comparison ( Google Doc)

When Copying a Course, quiz content (including math equations) that was created with the new Rich Content Editor (RCE),  the quiz content is not copied over but links to the original course, to which a student may not have access.  This applies to New Quiz content that was created after the new RCE was enabled for New Quizzes on December 17, 2022 and then copied to a new course.

Until this issue is resolved, we recommend turning off the new RCE in New Quizzes, which means you will have access to the older version of the RCE.

1. 1. If you are building a New Quiz from scratch or you are copying a quiz that has not been modified with the new RCE (where no course content or math equations were added since December 17, 2022), your content will be editable and also viewable by students.
   2. If you have modified your quiz and added any course content or math equations since December 17, 2022, but didn’t copy the quiz into a new course, or only copied within the same course, your students will still be able to see it, but that content won’t be editable. That means in the editor it will look broken, and if you’d like to edit it (e.g. modify the size of an image), you’ll need to delete and re-add the image.
   3. If you have added course content and copied the quiz outside the original course, your students may not have access to the course content while quiz taking. You will need to delete that content and re-add to your copied quiz in order for you to make edits and ensure it is viewable by all students.

Canvas Post on Turning off the New RCE in New Quizzes