[New Quizzes] Practice quizzes

I  am updating my course for the upcoming academic year and I have stumbled upon a major roadblock regarding quizzes. 

With the Classic Quizzes set to disappear next summer, it doesn't seem worth my while to rely on them, but the New Quizzes are lacking a key feature: PRACTICE QUIZZES. 

The lack of practice quizzes is a major issue for me and other colleagues because, as language teachers, we rely massively on quizzes (especially this year that we are set to be doing a lot of our teaching online). I know that it is possible to set the New Quizzes so that they are worth 0 points and do not count towards the grades, but the fact that they HAVE to be set as an assignment creates a huge problem: without practice quizzes, every single quiz will appear in the syllabus and I would have at least 6 quizzes per week in a 24 week course! This will get very messy, very fast.

I know I can just hide the course summary in the syllabus, but that still would leave us with the problem of students having tens of confusing "assignments" on their calendar (I believe they still would appear under "undated"). Also, I just discovered that hidding the course summary hides the mini calendar and assignment weighting information on the right side of the page too, which renders the syllabus pretty much useless!

Being able to just have the quizzes as practice and add them to the modules where necessary without them being categorised as assignments is the ideal, as it is the case with Classic Quizzes. They may not be as fancy, but they are much more user friendly. 

I cannot understand why the choice was made to remove this essential option - a newer engine should offer the same features as the prior one plus additional ones, not less! I really hope this is something that will be implemented soon. 

Estefanía

37 Comments
bosung_kim
Community Explorer

It will be wonderful if future New Quizzes has a practice quiz option. We've been preparing open pronunciation tutorial sites via Canvas platform, and like that this Classic practice quiz type doesn't require log-in. Knowing that Classic quizzes set to disappear, we cannot invest our effort into creating open resources using Classic practice quiz type.

rdictor
Community Participant

If I understand this ask, it is to have 0-point assignments not show up in the Assignments Index and Gradebook, and I fully agree. We are in the process of migrating thousands of Classic Quizzes, and are having to create so many workarounds for practice quizzes and surveys. In many cases, ungraded surveys are now 0-point assignments, and we have the same situation. I could have sworn I saw somewhere that this idea was in development, but I have been unable to find it. Please advise, thank you!

heather_houston
Community Member

Yes! Agree with all the comments. I'd love New Quizzes to have a practice mode so that it doesn't get added to the gradebook!

slehvie
Community Member

I agree with a lot of these comments. New quizzes are lacking in many respects. I am not looking forward to no longer having classical quizzes.

 

PMH
Community Explorer

I agree with the original post and those that followed. Removing the Practice Quiz from New Quizzes makes no sense and means that i must retain Classic Quizzes for all the sample exam and chapter quizzes on my course site (N=25 quizzes). I want to shuffle questions, so I have to use New Quizzes for exams. It would be more convenient to have ONE quiz system that retains the important/desired features of both Classic and New quiz formats. It is time for instructure to get more faculty feedback (that you take seriously) before the design/coding teams gorge ahead deleting and adding new features in quizzes and elsewhere.

willmoin
Community Participant

Yeah this is a bit crazy - with some of our staff in a justaposition between Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes (too late to reverse strategy now)  it very difficult to know how best to signpost students to a collection of non-grade bearing quizzes. It seems from our testing that all New Quizzes appear in Assignments regardless of the 'Do not count this assignment towards the final grade' setting, which our tutors (also from languages) do not want. However the Quiz area has this weird distinction that no longer has relevance with New Quizzes. Help!!!!!!

SharonAltena
Community Member

Absolutely agree with the comments above. The Course Summary section looks overwhelming for students if all of their practice quizzes are displayed and are mixed in with their Summative assessment tasks. Although you can force practice quizzes to the bottom of the list by not including a due date, it is not as good as the Classic Quizzes in this respect.

KristinL
Community Team
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