Test Bank maximum

[MtHomeATCNSE]

What is the maximum amount of questions you can add to one Test Bank?

I'm having issued adding/editing questions in a bank that currently has 65 questions. Is this the max? 

[MatthewClifft]

Hi MtHome, 

I don't believe there is a hard set limit to questions in a question bank or item bank. This being the case, the actual limit is mostly going to be browser/PC based, as you may reach a point where your device or browser just isn't capable of loading that many items. It's similar to how you can have as many quizzes, assignments, and discussions in your course as you wish, but eventually there will be too many to load for your browser, and your browser will refuse to load the assignments page, though this is more in the hundreds to thousands range.

If you are experiencing issues adding questions to a question or item bank when you're at around 65 questions, I would recommend reaching out to Canvas support, as they can help troubleshoot your specific issue. You can also try clearing your browser cache and cookies, which does tend to help performance, and we have guides for PC or for MAC on that process if you need them.

[jorossi]

I fail to see how a browser would limit the number of anything you would want to import into it.  In theory, if the HTML of a given URL contained several million entries of any particular type (i.e., "Questions"), your browser would load them sequentially as needed.  There IS NO LIMIT to the size of a page a browser can load.  That's the beauty of the internet and the HTML language that supports it.  If there are any limits they must be imposed by Canvas, and there should be an integer that expresses the answer to the OP's question.  I have the same question, but for a completely different reason.  I'm planning on dealing with item banks exceeding 2000 questions.  Given that 2000 exceeds 100s and IS in the THOUSANDS range, your answer does not help me.  Unless you can explain how the capacity of a browser may limit the number of questions stored in an item bank, presumably on an instructure server, you have not adequately answered the question.  Since you are looking at this from the viewpoint of a reality that doesn't exist, could you please explain what you mean,if Firefox (Windows) is the browser?  Using Firefox, I routinely access data sets that have millions of entries, does that mean I can access millions of items in a Canvas Item Bank, or is there a limit to the number of items that the Bank will hold (which is the OP's actual question, I believe)?

Thinking it over from my question point of view (which shouldn't be limited by the capacity of a browser because it really doesn't involve loading anything into the browser), what is the limit of the number of items that can be stored in a Canvas Item Bank? (again this should be an integer, or a maximum character limit, and whatever it is, it should be finite!)

[NicoletteStaley · Accepted solution]

@MtHomeATCNSE Currently there is no published maximum side for question banks or item banks in Canvas.  I have personally seen both Item Banks and Question Banks with over 1,000 questions in them.  What @MatthewClifft meant by the limit possibly being browser-based was that if you are adding/editing questions via the UI, your browser may not be able to process all the question data to render it successfully.  Often page load errors, or errors related to the page taking too long to load may result if there is too much data being retrieved by a page.  Since most of the content displayed on a question/item bank page in Canvas is not diurectly loaded as HTML from Instructure's servers but is generated by your browser using React and data derived from the questions contained in the bank, this is cause issues with large banks in a browser.

If you are importing the questions from another source (for example as QTI files), there may be issues with formatting of the data in those files that is preventing all of the questions from importing as expected.  For example, I have seen cases where the questions contained special characters that resulted in the XML in the QTI from becoming improperly formatted and preventing some content from import successfully.