Extended Time Accommodations in Canvas

By Valerie Ober, December 2, 2021

Setting Extended Time For Canvas Quizzes

As finals near, the Canvas Support Team would like to give some extra pointers to faculty with students who receive extended time on quizzes and exams. Detailed instructions are available below, as well as on the SAS website and the IT Knowledgebase. If you would like to meet one-on-one with support staff to review or learn how to set extended time for quizzes, there are several options available:

  1. Canvas Support is available 24/7 via the Chat and Hotline. Click on the Help Menu in Canvas to launch chat, get the hotline phone number, or visit the Canvas Community. Please contact Canvas Support before reaching out to IT @ IC.
  2. Faculty (and students) can stop by the Tech Bar, located in Job 104 next to the Service Desk, for 1:1 assistance Monday-Friday 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. Faculty can also send an email to schedule a time (techbar@ithaca.edu).
  3. Faculty can contact Student Accessibility Services to schedule a time to review testing accommodations and how to provide extra time for Canvas-based assessments.

Students who receive testing accommodations must also receive those accommodations while taking exams through Canvas. Both Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes allow faculty to set extended time for individual students within a course.

Setting extended time on standard/Classic quizzes

  1. Create your quiz. Set the time limit to reflect how long the class has to complete the assessment. You must set a time limit for the quiz to set extended time for any students.
    1. If you set “Available From” and “Available Until” times, be sure that the window of time available is as long as the extended quiz time needed for any of your students.
  2. PUBLISH the quiz. Note: If you don’t want the quiz to be available to your students when it is published, set the “Available From” date to a future date/time.
  3. Once the quiz is published, select the “Moderate This Quiz” link in the upper right corner of the page. This will show you a list of students and various details about their quiz attempts.
  4. Select the student(s)
    1. To set extended time for a single student, click the pencil (Edit) icon at the far right of that record.
    2. To set extended time for multiple students, click the box next to the name of each student that needs extended time and click “Change Extensions for XX Selected Students” at the bottom of the table.
  5. This opens a window that allows you to either provide extra attempts or extra time for each attempt at the quiz. To set extended time, enter the EXTRA time the student should receive for the exam. If a quiz is set to be 10 minutes, for example, and the student has an accommodation for time and a half (1.5 times what the rest of the class receives), enter 5 into the “Extra time on every attempt” field.
  6. Click “Save” when you are done.
  7. You should now see the extra time allotted for each of the selected students under their name.

If a student is CURRENTLY taking an assessment, the table on the “Moderate Quiz” page should show a small, blue clock next in the “Time” field. To extend time on the assessment, click the clock icon. Using this method, you only set extended time for the current attempt. Future attempts at the assessment will default back to the time allotted for the class.

Set extended time for New Quizzes

New Quizzes offer different methods for adding extended time. There are actually two options for doing this:

  1. Set extended time limits for a student that will apply to ALL New Quizzes within the course.
  2. Add time to a single quiz attempt. This works differently than with Classic Quizzes because this CANNOT be done while the student is actively taking the quiz. If time limits for a student are changed while a student is actively taking the assessment, the student will NOT receive extended time.

Note: As with Classic Quizzes, make sure that the Available Until date provides enough time for students receiving extended time. All quizzes will be automatically submitted when the Available Until date is reached.

To extend time limits for ALL New Quizzes for a given student

  1. Create and PUBLISH your quiz.
  2. Click the “Build” button at the bottom of the page.
  3. At the top of the Build module, click “Settings” to establish a time limit for the quiz that will apply to the entire class.
  4. Click “Moderate” to view information about individual students.
  5. Click the pencil icon (Edit) under the “Accommodations” heading.
  6. Modify the time adjustments for the student by selecting “Give Additional Time” or “Time Limit Multiplier”. For SAS accommodations, it is easiest to use “Time Limit Multiplier” to add extra time based on the accommodations listed in the students’ Accommodation Letter (the most common are one and a half times (1.5x) and double time (2x) for exams).
  7. Click the “Save” button.
  8. You will now see the extended time granted to that student. This extended time will be applied to ALL New Quiz attempts for the course.

To extend the time limit for a SINGLE New Quiz for a given student

  1. Create and PUBLISH your quiz.
  2. Click the “Build” button at the bottom of the page.
  3. At the top of the Build module, click “Settings” to establish a time limit for the quiz that will apply to the entire class.
  4. Click “Moderate” to view information about individual students.
  5. The pop-out panel shows how many attempts have already been made for the assessment, how much time the student is granted (including time set using the accommodation method).
  6. Use the “Time adjustments” drop-down and the “Hours” and “Minutes” fields to give additional time or remove all time limits for this quiz.
  7. Any additional time given for the quiz will now show under the “Accommodations” heading.

Note: It is not possible to use the Moderation settings to REMOVE time from a quiz attempt.

Note: Moderating a single quiz will apply any moderation settings on top of any accommodations that have already been set.