API call to pull specific assignments from multiple courses

Greeting all,

I’m looking for a bit of help.

I need to pull a specific assignment from multiple courses for program assessment purposes. For example, I’d like to extract Quiz 1 submissions from all ENG-101 courses in Spring 2025. I only need the submission content—no names, dates, or grades.

I’ve reviewed the Canvas API documentation and explored a few starting points (including ChatGPT), but I’d prefer not to reinvent the wheel if someone has already developed a script or method for this task and would be willing to share.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Best regards,
David Riddle
Director of LMS Operations, FTCC

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Chris

Hi @DavidRiddle,

I tried to do a bit of Googling for you, but I didn't find anyone with this exact ask before. It might be helpful to know what programming language(s) you're able to work in as there may be snippets you can bring together to form your final product.

As I imagine this in my head, you're going to need to chain a few API calls together...

The first thing you'll need is a list of courses (course_id information, specifically) for which you need to get the submission. There are a lot of ways you could go about this, so perhaps if you can give more info about your project someone could go into detail with the best oethod.

Once you have a specific course you'll need to find the correct assignment in each course. That will involve the List Assignments API, probably using the search_term parameter. You may need to figure out how to deal with a situation where no results are found (maybe instructor named the quiz something different) or multiple results were found (search for "quiz 1" may return "quiz 1" and "quiz 11" and "quiz 12" etc...).

Once you have the assignment_id, you'll need to then use the List Assignment Submissions API to get a list of all the submissions for that assignment. That list should contain a URL, but I believe you may need to use a headless browser to authenticate and download the file. Where you save the file, and whether you want specific names/folders/etc are things you'd need to determine and account for in your code.

Essentially you're going create for "for each" type loops for each step, which in the end should get you all of the files...

As you can see, this isn't necessarily a trivial task, but if you're using a popular programming language like python, you're probably going to be able to quickly find some examples you can riff off of or even straight up combine together into a functional project. The headless browser/authentication part may be the trickiest, but I'm not 100% sure because I've never had ot do that in any of my projects.

Please chime back in with more details if you can!

-Chris

James

@DavidRiddle

By submission content, do you mean the answers on the quiz or the score on the quiz?

For classic quizzes, you can take what @chriscas wrote about the list assignment submissions and add the query parameter include[]=submission_history to get the individual responses to the quiz questions. That API can get you the scores with or without adding in the data.

If you want the quiz results that look like a quiz looks, then you can follow the URL like Chris suggested.

Another possibility is to generate the student analysis report from the quiz statistics. For classic quizzes, it generates a spreadsheet that may or may not be helpful -- the usefulness of it depends on the question types. This can be automated with the Quiz Reports API.

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