Classic Quizzes vs. New Quizzes in Canvas

Tags Canvas Quiz

There are 2 "Quiz Engines" in Canvas: Classic Quizzes (CQ) and New Quizzes (NQ). See the full feature comparison between CQ and NQ prepared by Canvas: Classic Quizzes/New Quizzes Feature Comparison. As of March 2022, the following are cases that may warrant the use of Classic Quizzes:

  1. If you want a Practice Quiz or Ungraded Survey (which will not appear in Canvas Gradebook) or a graded survey. There is currently no survey functionality in NQ. Therefore, if you plan to use surveys long-term in your courses, we recommend the third-party tool Qualtrics (http:\\framingham.qualtrics.com).
  2. If you rely on certain features of the RCE (Accessibility Checker, E Plug, HTML editor, Embedding)
    1. Note: This is a deal-breaker for many users for NQ, there has been vocal backlash, and Canvas is actively working on it
  3. It is somewhat easier to import content as a Classic Quiz (but you could always import then migrate)
  4. You need to download CSV of quiz statistic report

On the other hand, there are several distinct advantages of New Quizzes:

  1. Better Lockdown Browser experience: LDB has an auto launch feature in new Quizzes. Very helpful. However, LBD does indeed work with both, including on Chromebook.
  2. Better moderation for accommodations 
  3. Better shuffling: Shuffle questions globally, shuffle answers globally AND per-question
  4. Easier Sharing of Banks
  5. Better Printing of Quizzes
  6. Better navigation and manipulation of banks: Tagging, Searching, Sorting filtering
  7. More question types: Categorization, Ordering, Hot Spot, Stimulus
  8. Show calculator on Quiz
  9. When you edit an item in the bank, it updates the question in quizzes that use that question (this is NOT the case in Classic)
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