Question Banks and Groups

Quizzes may contain a number of individual questions selected from a Question Bank, or can be set up to use Question Groups, which select a number of questions randomly from a pool of questions selected from the Question Bank.

Before you learn how to create questions, let's explore how Question Banks and Question Groups work in greater detail. After you understand how Question Banks and Groups work, then we'll explain how to actually create quiz questions in Canvas; then you'll also be able to choose how you want to utilize (if at all) Question Banks and Groups.

Question Banks

The Question Bank in Canvas is a place where individual quiz questions reside. Quiz questions can be further organized into Question Groups to group questions that are similar in content or subject matter.

To Create a Question Bank:

  1. Click on the Quizzes tab
  2. Click on the Manage Question Banks button located on the right hand side of the page. This will take you to a new page.
  3. Click on the Add Question Bank button from the right hand side of the page.
  4. Give the bank a name and press Enter

Canvas Instructor Guide: How do I create a Question Bank?

Potential Question Bank Issue

Question Banks do NOT sync with quizzes the way Angel did. If a question is changed in a Question Bank it will not be changed in the quiz. In addition, if a question is changed in a quiz it will not be changed in the Question Bank.

Question Groups

Question Groups are created within a quiz, and allow you to select a number of questions randomly from a larger subset of questions. Question Groups are also the only way to randomize questions even if you are using all of the questions in the Question Group. In Canvas, we create Question Groups within the quiz itself, then add questions to those groups from the Question Bank. Question Groups are similar to a question set in Angel.

Example of how a question group works

You could add 20 questions from the Question Bank into a Question Group, and set the Group to randomly select 10 of those questions for the quiz.

To create a Question Group

  1. Access a quiz and click the "Edit This Quiz" button; this would be after you setup your quiz settings.
  2. Click on the "New Question Group" link at the bottom of the page
  3. Name the question group, pick how many questions you want students to get from this question group, and the number of points per question.
  4. If the questions you want to add to the Question Group are already in the Question Bank, click on "Link to a Question Bank" and select a bank by clicking on it and then the "Select Bank" button.
  5. If the questions you want to add to the Question Group are not in the Question Bank and you are going to add the questions within the quiz, click "Create Group" and then start creating your Questions.
  6. Remember after you're done adding your questions to click the "Create Group" button BEFORE saving the quiz.

 Additional Resource

Canvas Instructor Guide: How do I reorder quiz questions or groups?