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This article offers an overview of Canvas New Quizzes features, with a focus on what New Quizzes offers that Classic Quizzes does not.
A permanent transition to Canvas New Quizzes is currently in progress. For more information, please visit the following resource: New Quizzes: Transition Overview and Timeline.
Audience
This article is intended for faculty.
Platform
Canvas
Contents
New Quizzes is Canvas's updated quiz engine. It offers everything Classic Quizzes does for core assessment, plus:
- Additional question types
- Stronger accommodations tools
- Expanded item banks
- More detailed reporting
This article details the differences between Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes.
In Canvas, Classic Quizzes appear with an outline of a rocket ship icon, while New Quizzes appear with a filled rocket ship icon.
New Question Types
New Quizzes includes all the question types available in Classic Quizzes (Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, True/False, Matching, Fill in the Blank, Essay, Numerical, Formula, and File Upload) plus four additional types:
- Categorization asks students to sort answer options into the correct categories. You can also include 'distractors' - incorrect answers that don't belong in any category - to increase rigor.
- Ordering asks students to arrange a set of items into the correct sequence, such as steps in a process or events on a timeline.
- Hot Spot asks students to identify a specific area on an uploaded image - for example, locating a structure on a diagram or a region on a map. (Note - Hot Spot questions are not accessible to students who use screen readers or keyboard-only navigation. If you use this question type, do not forget to plan an accessible alternative.)
- Stimulus (Passage) is not a standalone question type but a container: it attaches a block of content - such as a reading passage, an image, a table, or a graph - to one or more associated questions. This is especially useful for reading comprehension exercises, data-interpretation sets, or any scenario where multiple questions reference the same source material.
New Quizzes also expands the Fill in the Blank question type to offer three entry modes in a single question: Open Entry (typed response), Dropdown, and Word Bank. Open Entry grading includes five matching options beyond the exact-match method used in Classic Quizzes, giving more flexibility for how student responses are evaluated.
Accommodations Tools
In Classic Quizzes, time extensions and extra attempts must be configured individually for each quiz, for each student. If a student has a testing accommodation that applies across an entire course,the instructor must repeat that setup on every quiz. New Quizzes allows you to apply these accommodations once for an individual student across all quizzes in the course.
New Quizzes streamlines this process. From the Moderate tab of any New Quiz, you can apply accommodations - such as extended time or additional attempts - at the course level for an individual student. Once set, these accommodations apply automatically to every New Quiz in that course, eliminating the need to configure each quiz separately.
Instructors can also still set quiz-specific accommodations when needed (for instance, granting an extra attempt on a single assessment). Additionally, New Quizzes allows instructors to add time to a quiz session that is already in progress, which can be helpful for handling unexpected circumstances during a live exam.
Item Banks
Both Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes support storing and reusing questions through banks, but they use separate systems with different capabilities.
Classic Quizzes uses Question Banks. These are course-specific and cannot be easily shared with other instructors or across courses without workarounds. When a question from a Question Bank is added directly to a quiz (without using a linked Question Group), the question is copied into the quiz and loses its connection to the bank - meaning edits to the bank won't update the quiz, and vice versa.
New Quizzes uses Item Banks, which offer several improvements. Item Banks are associated with the instructor's user account rather than a single course, so they can be used across any course where that instructor has quiz-editing permissions. Item Banks also support sharing with colleagues - the bank owner can grant view-only or edit access to other users. Changes made to a question in an Item Bank automatically update across every quiz that references that question, keeping content consistent.
Item Banks also include improved organization tools: you can search and filter within your banks and tag questions with metadata to make it easier to locate items by topic, difficulty, or other characteristics. Questions in Item Banks can also be aligned with Learning Outcomes, which feeds into the Outcome Analysis report (see Reporting, below).
Classic Quizzes Question Banks are not directly interchangeable with New Quizzes Item Banks. Migrating content requires exporting from Classic Quizzes as a QTI file and importing it into a New Quizzes Item Bank. For step-by-step instructions, see the following additional resource:
Reporting
New Quizzes provides three built-in reports that go beyond the quiz statistics available in Classic Quizzes. Reports are accessible from the Reports tab within any New Quiz (via the Build view) and require at least three student submissions to generate.
Quiz and Item Analysis provides two layers of data. At the quiz level, it shows summary statistics including high score, low score, mean score, standard deviation, mean elapsed time, and Cronbach's Alpha (a measure of internal consistency across questions). At the item level, it provides a Difficulty Index (proportion of students who answered correctly), a Discrimination Index (how well the question differentiates between high- and low-scoring students), and a Corrected Item-Total Correlation Coefficient. Answer Frequency Summary charts show the distribution of student responses for most auto-graded question types. The full report can also be downloaded as a CSV file for further analysis.
Student Analysis provides a row-by-row view of each student's responses and the points awarded for each question. This report can help instructors identify patterns in individual student performance and is also downloadable as a CSV.
Outcome Analysis is exclusive to New Quizzes and is not available in Classic Quizzes. When quiz questions are aligned to Learning Outcomes (either directly or through an Item Bank), this report shows each student's mastery status for each outcome. You can drill into individual outcomes to see the number of students who reached mastery, the average score, and performance distribution across mastery levels. This is particularly useful for program-level assessment or for tracking student progress toward course learning goals. (Note: Outcomes associated with questions in Item Banks will only appear in this report if those Outcomes have also been added to the course.)