Fixing Problematic Quiz Questions

Before starting on this guide, answer these questions:

1. Have students taken the quiz?
   1. If no: Then you can just fix the question. Follow the steps for editing quiz questions.
   2. If yes: proceed to (B) below.
2. Is the problem something that’s affecting students’ scores?
   1. If no (e.g. if there’s a typo): Follow the steps for editing quiz questions.
   2. If yes: Continue with this guide.

Problem: The wrong answer is marked as correct

1. Follow the steps for editing quiz questions. When you get to the question editing page:
   • To mark the correct answer as correct, change the “Grade” dropdown to 100%.
   • Set the “Grade” dropdown for all the other answers (i.e. the choices that are incorrect) to 0%.
2. Save the question and follow the steps for regrading a quiz.

Problem: More than one of the answer choices are actually correct

1. Follow the steps for editing quiz questions. When you get to the question editing page:
   • Change the “One or multiple answers” dropdown to Multiple answers allowed.
   • Find the answer choice(s) that are correct and change the “Grade” dropdown on these to 100%.
2. Save the question and follow the steps for regrading a quiz.

Problem: None of the answer choices are actually correct

This is a trickier situation because there’s not going to be a good way to regrade students automatically. The first thing you want to do is get the bad question out of the pool of possible questions (assuming your quiz is pulling questions randomly from the question bank). FYI – if you don’t want to keep the question at all, just do step 4 and delete the question.

First remove the quiz question from circulation

1. Go to your question bank and find the problematic question. Click the Edit dropdown, then select Duplicate. This will create a copy of the question and open it’s editing page.
2. On the editing page of the duplicated question, fix the question by adding the correct answer. Make sure to change the “Grade” dropdown on the correct answer to 100% and, for all the other answers (i.e. the choices that are incorrect), change the “Grade” dropdown to 0%.
3. Save the question.
4. Now delete the original (incorrect) question. You’ll know which one it is because it will be the one that does not have (copy) after it’s name. To delete it, click the Edit dropdown, then select Delete. It will ask if you are sure you want to delete and something about the question already being used in a quiz. Confirm that you want to delete the question

Then fix the students’ scores

Following the steps above will get the bad question out of the pool of possible questions and, if you did steps 1-3, you’ve added a correct version of the question to the pool. Now, what to do for students who have received the bad question? Well, you have a few options.

Fastest option: Add an extra point to all quiz attempts

Following these steps will add 1 point to everyone’s score, regardless of if they had the faulty question on their quiz. It will only go up to the max value of the quiz. For example, if the quiz is worth 20 points, students who got 20/20 will still have 20/20, not 21/20.

1. Go to the gradebook and click the Setup tab.
2. Find the row with the quiz you want to adjust.
3. Click the Edit dropdown then select Edit settings.
4. In the “Grade item” section, click the Show more… link.
5. In the “Offset” field, enter 1 (or however many points the question was worth).
6. Click Save changes.

Slower option: Manually override points on the problem question

Following these steps involves finding attempts from students who had the question on their quiz (and were penalized for answering it “incorrectly”) and overriding the mark on that question to give them credit.

1. Go to the quiz.
2. Click the gear icon then select Grades, under “Results.”
3. Change the following report settings:
   • For the “Attempts from” dropdown, make sure enrolled users who have attempted the quiz is selected
   • For “Attempts that are,” only leave Finished checked.
   • Check the box for Show at most one finished attempt per user.
   • For the “Points for each question” dropdown (under “Display options”), select No.
4. Click Show report.
5. Scroll through the list of quiz results. When you come to a student who earned less than full credit, click on their score to open up the attempt (you can also click Review attempt under the student’s name).
6. On the attempt review page, do Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F, to type in some of the text in the question name to locate the question on the page (if it exists). Once you’ve found the question, if it was marked as incorrect, click Make comment or override points.
7. In the window that pops up, change the mark field from 0 to 1. Optionally add in the “Comment” text area something like “Correct answer not present.” Then click Save.
8. Repeat steps 5-7 until you’ve looked at all the quiz attempts from students who earned less than full credit.