How to prevent duplicate random question pulls?

JonBerry

Canvas allows us to copy the same question into multiple Item Banks. When making a quiz, you can select X number of questions to be randomly pulled from an Item Bank. If I'm making a quiz with multiple Item Banks, and the same question appears in 2 of those Item Banks, does Canvas know to not pull the same question twice?

Specific Example:

I teach an Astronomy course. We start the year with an overview of the Solar System, then later focus on the Inner Planets and the Outer Planets. If I a question about Mars in both the Solar System Item Bank and the Inner Planets Item Bank, and pull random questions from both of those Item Banks for the semester exam, could a student see that same Mars question twice since it's in two Item Banks?

JeffCampbell

Hypothetically, yes, it could pull the same question. Off the top of my head, I am not sure of a way to set this up to avoid duplicate questions when pulling from different banks. I did try testing if a quiz can only pull a few random questions, then put in some new questions, then pull from the same bank again…it duplicated one question.

Best practice would be to consider keeping questions isolated to specific banks. For example, Inner Planets and Outer Planets would be the only banks containing questions specific to those planets. Your Solar System bank would then have questions not specific to those planets. Things like Asteroid/Kuiper Belts, Oort Cloud, planetary formation, orbital mechanics…I think you get the picture. This way, you can keep them organized for when those concepts are specifically needed for assessments. When you have a bigger, end-of-unit exam, you can then pull from each without risk of overlap. It would mean your tests would see questions grouped by topic, but this can be partially overcome by turning on the option to randomize question order.

A tip given years ago by a colleague. They set a goal to add to their question banks once a week. Even if only one question. They broke their banks down granularly by topics. Over the course of several years, most banks had 20-30 questions in them. Some were merely variations of the same work (particularly math-related questions). Some of those banks had over 50 questions and he might have the system only pull 10 at random. His argument was that the more questions you had and the more broken down the banks were, the better the results helped him know who was doing well and who was struggling.