New Quiz results settings - Show questions only once?

DSSCC

Students will be taking quizzes asynchronously over a week. I want them to be able to review the questions and their responses for a limited time after they take each quiz. I can do that for the responses, either using show/hide dates or checking "only once." However, I don't see any way to restrict their access to the questions. This is a problem for me because it makes it much easier for students who take quizzes earlier to share the questions with their classmates who take them later.

It seems illogical that this functionality exists for the responses but not the questions. Am I interpreting it wrong? Other than hiding all questions and responses completely so they can't review anything, is there any way to restrict student access to the quiz questions after the quiz?

James

@DSSCC,

To provide context for those who may be unfamiliar with New Quizzes, the How do I manage quiz results in New Quizzes? lesson in the Canvas Instructor Guide explains the settings. Enable "Hide results from students" and then you can tell it what to show. The first option is "Show questions" and if you leave that unchecked, then students will not be able to see the questions. Selecting "Show Questions" is necessary, though, to get to the "only once" or the "show on" and "hide on" dates.

From a user experience, it makes no sense to show results for questions without showing the questions, which is why the options to view the results are under "Show questions". You're not hiding their score with "show questions", you're only hiding the individual questions and potentially their responses.

Canvas does not have the functionality to specify when to show the questions outside of also showing the responses. They try to keep the interface clean and simple while catering to the majority of the middle-level users (that number used to be the middle 60%, but that was back in 2017). Sometimes, the high-end users don't get the full functionality they want because it would over complicate things for the others. It would be confusing to most to have two sets of when to show things, once for the questions and again for the results when most people just want to hide the results or show nothing besides the overall grades.

While not exactly what you're after, you can disable showing questions until the quiz is completely over. Then you go back in and enable the "show questions" and potentially the student responses. This will allow student to review old quizzes for exams, but make it harder for them to share questions during the week they're taking the quizzes.

I say harder because determined students will work around whatever you put in there unless you're proctoring the quizzes. They may have a screen recorder enabled; they may have a phone take pictures of the screen; they may have a group of friends with them as the first person takes the quiz; they could be using AI to answer the questions. The list goes on and on and I'm not intending to provide an all-inclusive list of the ways students get creative. I'm just pointing out that letting them see the questions once when they're done isn't really doing much to prevent question sharing. And with the onset of AI, most students aren't even bothering to share questions anymore because it's quicker to just ask AI.

Things that can help are randomizing the order of the questions, showing one question at a time, using a bank of questions where the number in the bank vastly exceeds the number given on the quiz, et. al. Making unproctored assignments worth a low percentage of the grade and proctored assignments worth a higher percentage is another recommendation.

I know that some schools are creating AI policies, but the existing quiz questions are still mostly AI-friendly. I suspect that trying to AI-proof your questions is a temporary fix. Incorporating AI and having students show their prompts and then explain what AI got wrong may have merit.

But right now, I would be more concerned about AI than students sharing questions amongst themselves or getting them from websites that host answers to question banks. In some ways, the use of AI has reduced the other forms of cheating. It's just not worth the effort to look up question banks and memorize answers when you can take a quiz and get 80% without any effort at all, especially when there is no penalty for using it.

You get to decide which is more important to you. Is it more important that students get immediate feedback on their individual responses or that you keep the questions hidden? That probably depends on the purpose of the quiz. When quizzes are low stakes and taking the place of homework, then letting them see the responses may be more beneficial. If it's a high-stakes exam, then I would not show anything except their final grade on the exam until I everyone had taken it.