Designing and building quizzes and exams takes practice. Here are tips on a range of topics, from making choices about quiz design to setting up your quiz in Canvas to individualizing time limits or retakes for specific students. Hopefully this will help you For more help setting up quizzes in Canvas, reach out to an SSU instructional designer.

Designing your quiz

Do your assessments match the course and unit outcomes? What are the critical things students need to do to show you they have mastery of the content? Is true/false enough, or is an essay required?
Are your quizzes aligned with what you've covered in your synchronous or asynchronous materials? Is there a clear relationship between the ways you've introduced and discussed course content and the approach you're adopting in your quiz?
How do you want to organize your quiz? Do you want to follow something like Bloom's Taxonomy, and move from understanding, to demonstration, to application? If so, this will guide the questions and question types you use.

Building your quiz

If you're still getting comfortable with Canvas quizzes, we recommend this four-minute Quizzes Overview Tutorial from Canvas Video Guides. Our "Ins and Outs of Quizzes" page may also help. Then:

Use the Quiz description to give students a clear sense of the expected time commitments and kinds of questions to expect (in terms of format and length: multiple choice, short / long essay, etc.).
Consider the purpose of your quiz. Is the main point of this quiz to help students get feedback on their own understanding/ mastery? If so, it's a formative quiz, and most likely low-stakes. If, on the other hand, the main point is to assess students' mastery at the end of a learning cycle, it's probably a summative assessment, which likely means higher stakes. Get ideas about different settings in Canvas for each type of quiz in Checklists for low and high-stakes Canvas quizzes.pdf
A summative or high-stakes assessment may bring concerns about academic integrity. Check out these suggestions to promote academic integrity, and consider using Canvas tools like time limits, question banks to shuffle questions, or limited windows of availability. Learn more here: Canvas Quiz Settings for Academic Integrity.

Finally, deliver your quiz to your students!

Once your quiz is published and students start taking it, you can use the Canvas Moderate Quizzes feature to review student progress in the quiz (including number of attempts, time, and score). You can also moderate the quiz settings for individual students, for example unlocking extra attempts or giving extra time.

More specific concerns:

Need help understanding the difference between time limits, due dates and "locking"? Check out our Canvas page: Quizzes: Time Limits vs. Due Dates vs. Availability ("Locking").
Need to give a quiz to just one student, or give a student extra time? Learn how to individualize quizzes.

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