Canvas: New Quizzes vs. Classic Quizzes

New Quizzes vs. Classic Quizzes

When you create a quiz in Canvas, you are presented with two Quiz Engine options: Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes. Which one should you choose?

The CTL recommends that you select Classic Quizzes. Although New Quizzes offers some new features, it is less reliable than Classic Quizzes and it also lacks features upon which many instructors depend. When you create your quiz, there is a link to "Learn more about the differences Links to an external site.". We'll highlight some of the differences here.

Reliability: New Quizzes have not shown to be as reliable as Classic Quizzes. For example,

• During the spring 2020 final exam period, New Quizzes became inaccessible to faculty and students attempting to create and write their final exams.
• In the fall of 2020 several instructors encountered issues with New Quizzes not properly syncing grades to the Canvas gradebook. The eventual restoration of this function caused the additional problem of overwriting grades entered manually for the affected quizzes.

In our experience, Classic Quizzes is the more stable tool and the one we recommend.

Integration with third-party applications: New Quizzes does not have an option for embedding Kaltura My Media videos.

Export Quiz: Quizzes created using New Quizzes cannot be exported from the course to be imported and used in other courses. Consequently, a New Quiz cannot be exported and processed by Respondus Quiz into a printable version.

Respondus Quiz Import: Some instructors prepare their quiz questions offline in Respondus Quiz then upload to Canvas. With New Quizzes you will need to import from Respondus Quiz into Classic Quiz, and then migrate the quiz to New Quizzes, but you will not be able to import the question types unique to New Quizzes.

Question Banks: Existing Classic Quiz question banks cannot be accessed directly from within New Quizzes. To get questions from question banks into New Quizzes, you have to put the questions in a Classic Quiz and then migrate it to New Quizzes.

Canvas Content Selection: You cannot easily select content from within your course to link to in New Quizzes. With Classic Quizzes, some instructors link to exam information contained within a pdf file or embed images from within their Files section, for example.

Question Types: New Quizzes offers some question types not available in Classic Quizzes. We recommend Classic Quizzes unless you absolutely need one of the unique New Quizzes question types: Hot Spot (locating a point in an image), Ordering (drag answers into a specific order) and Categorization (place answers into a specific category).

Ability to Switch Engines: If you have set up your quiz in New Quizzes, it is not possible to switch it back to Classic Quizzes. However, if you have set up your quiz in Classic Quizzes, you can migrate it to a New Quiz.

 

To learn more about Canvas Quizzes, contact ctl.helpdesk@ubc.ca.

Updated May 2021