NEW QUIZZES · TWO SCREENS · ABOUT TEN MINUTES

Let some students retake an exam, not the whole class

A few students bombed the test and you want to give them another run at it — without handing everyone a free second attempt. New Quizzes does this on its own. Settings turns the second attempt on and keeps the class at one. Moderate hands it to the students you name. Every screen below is the real thing, with the control you click circled.

Giving this as a test that counts? Check the six test-security musts: close the window, access code, hidden results, LockDown Browser, extra time, leaving the room. See all six →

Idea starters, not finished practice. None of this is an expectation. Whether a retake should count, and for how much, is your call and your department's — you are right about your subject and I am not. What follows is the Canvas side.

Decide three things first

Who is offered it, what shape it takes, and whether they earn it.

TAKES one coffee

GETS YOU a retake you can explain to the class

Do it, screen by screen

Five clicks in Settings, five in Moderate. Pictures of both.

TAKES ten minutes

GETS YOU a retake only the students you name can see

Decide what it is worth

One dropdown decides full credit, half credit or none.

TAKES one dropdown

GETS YOU the partial credit you intended

“What if I do worse?”

The first thing students ask. The answer is better than they expect.

TAKES one minute to read

GETS YOU something straight to tell them

Give back only a portion

Canvas has no setting for it. Here is how to do it anyway.

TAKES five minutes for the class

GETS YOU half the gain, a ceiling, or nobody overtaking anyone

RETAKE IS A SEPARATE QUIZ (A VERSION B)?

Tag the students who are retaking, then assign the retake only to that tag. Nobody else sees it on their list. The tag way →

01 Decide three things first

None of these are Canvas questions, and all three change what you click. Settle them before you open the quiz — the walkthrough in section 02 is five minutes once you have.

1 · Who is offered it

Everyone, or only students under a line you set. A cutoff is the common choice and it is the one that generates complaints — see the box below. Offering it to the whole class also removes the Moderate step entirely: you just set Attempts to 2 and they choose for themselves.

2 · Corrections, or the whole exam again

Corrections serves only the questions they missed, is short and targeted, and cannot lose them ground — but they never revisit what they already knew, which is the part a second pass strengthens. The whole exam covers the unit rather than the errors, which is what you want ahead of a comprehensive final. It costs a full sitting, and you must leave Score to keep on Highest — then it cannot hurt anyone either. This is control 5 on the Settings screen.

3 · Do they earn it first

You can require the work before the second attempt: set written corrections or a reflection as a separate assignment, and grant the extra attempt in Moderate only to the students who turn it in. Same five clicks, used as a gate — and the retake then follows study rather than replacing it. This is the one choice that does not combine with opening the retake to the whole class — a gate needs the Moderate step.

If you set a cutoff, expect the students just above it to feel hard done by — and they have a point. The fairness question sits in who was invited, not in how it was scored. Opening the retake to anyone who wants it costs you nothing in grade risk when Score to keep is on Highest, since no one can finish lower than they started. What it costs is your time and theirs. Whether that trade is worth it is your call — it is worth knowing which lever the complaint is actually about. If you want to keep the cutoff and answer the complaint anyway, there is a third way: cap what the retake can reach at the cutoff itself, so nobody who was invited can finish above somebody who was not. Section 06 has the arithmetic, and the catch.

02 On the Settings tab — five controls

Open the quiz and click Build. Five tabs run across the top: Build, Settings, Moderate, Reports, Exports. Go to Settings and scroll to Allow multiple attempts. Turning it on opens the four controls beside it. This is what you are looking at:

The Allow multiple attempts row on the New Quizzes Settings tab, with five controls numbered: the Allow multiple attempts toggle, Score to keep, Allowed attempts set to Limited, Attempts set to 1, and the Enable build on last attempt checkbox.

The Settings tab, control by control
1	Allow multiple attempts — switch it on. Four controls appear to its right.
2	Score to keep — this is the grade decision. Leave it for a moment and see section 04.
3	Allowed attempts — set it to Limited.
4	Attempts — type 1. This is the move that keeps the class at one attempt. Canvas accepts 1 without complaint.
5	Enable build on last attempt — tick it, and the retake serves only the questions they got wrong. Leave it unticked for a full retake.

There is no Save button on this tab. New Quizzes saves each setting the moment you click away from it and flashes a green Your quiz has been saved bar at the top. Do not go hunting for a button that isn't there — and do not change a setting you only meant to look at. Canvas guide: every setting on this tab →

Can they see what they got wrong?

Further down the same Settings tab is Hide results from students, and under it Show questions, Show student responses and a choice of For all attempts, Only once after each attempt or Only after their last attempt. If results are hidden, a student walks into the retake with no idea which questions they missed or why — which turns a correction into a guess. Decide what they can see before you open it.

Make them wait before retaking

The third control in that row is Waiting period — tick Require time between attempts and set days, hours or minutes. It stops a student re-sitting immediately on the strength of what they can still remember from the first go, and it is the simplest way to put study between the two attempts without setting up a separate assignment.

03 On the Moderate tab — one student at a time

Settings has now given everybody one attempt. Moderate is where you hand a second one to the students you choose. Click the Moderate tab and you get your class list, with a pencil at the right-hand end of every row.

A student row on the New Quizzes Moderate page, with the pencil icon at the far right circled and numbered 1.

The Current Quiz Accommodation panel in New Quizzes, showing the Attempts tab, the Default, Additional and Total attempt counts, the Additional Attempts box with 1 typed in it, and the Apply button, numbered 2 to 5.

The Moderate tab, click by click — repeat for each student you are offering this to
1	Click the pencil at the end of that student's row. A panel slides out from the right.
2	The panel opens on Time Limit. Click the Attempts tab beside it.
3	Read the three lines. Default: 1 attempt · Additional: 0 attempts · Total: 1 attempt. Default is what Settings gave the whole class.
4	Type 1 in Additional Attempts. That student's Total becomes 2. Nobody else's moves.
5	Click Apply. Unlike Settings, this panel does need the button.

The panel tells you its own scope. The blue note at the top reads these settings apply to the current quiz only. Nothing you do here follows the student to their next quiz, and nothing reaches the rest of the class. Canvas guide: the Moderate page →

After they retake: mark it Retake

In Grades, click the student’s score for this exam, click the arrow that appears in the cell, and choose Retake under Status. The cell turns light purple, so you can see at a glance who retook. In SpeedGrader, Retake is in the status dropdown.

It is a label only; it does not change the score. What the retake is worth is still yours to set (section 06). Don’t mark retakes Late: students and parents read that as late work, and Late is the one status that takes points off.

04 What the retake is worth

Control 2 on that first screen. With Build on Last Attempt running, the second attempt is scored as the whole exam — the questions they already had right, carried forward, plus whatever they fix. A student who started at 60 and corrects everything finishes at 100, and Score to keep decides which of those two numbers reaches the gradebook. Worth saying plainly, because it is the thing most people get wrong: you are not grading a separate corrections quiz and adding it on. Attempt 2 is a complete exam score in its own right.

Score to keep — the four options, and what a student who went from 60 to 100 ends up with
Setting	That student gets	Pick it when
Highest	100 — the corrected score, in full.	Corrections earn the credit back outright, or you would rather set the ceiling yourself afterward (section 06).
Average	80 — the midpoint of the two attempts.	You want partial credit without doing arithmetic. Read the warning below before you pick it for a full retake.
Latest	100 — same as Highest here.	No reason to choose it over Highest. Under Build on Last Attempt the later attempt is never the lower one.
First	60 — the original score stands.	The retake is for the learning, not the grade. You see what they can now do and the number does not move.

Average is the one setting that can lower a grade. It splits the two attempts whatever happens, so on a full retake a student who sat at 75 and had a bad morning at 50 records a 62.5. Under Build on Last Attempt that cannot happen, because the second attempt is never lower. If you are reopening the whole exam, use Highest and set your ceiling by hand.

Tell them which one you picked before they start. The question underneath “how will you score it” is usually “is it safe to try.” Should this be graded? →

05 They cannot come out worse than they started

This holds when Build on Last Attempt is on. Once a question has been marked correct, Canvas locks it and never serves it again. Its points travel into the new attempt untouched, and the student is only shown what they missed. The floor is the score they already had; the ceiling is full marks. A student who opens the retake, fixes nothing and submits lands exactly where they were.

Say that out loud when you offer it. The students who most need a second attempt are usually the ones most afraid of making things worse.

The one exception — questions that earned partial credit · one minute

Canvas locks a question only when it is marked correct. A question that earned partial credit — a multiple-answer item where they picked two of three, a numeric answer inside a wide margin — is not correct, so it comes back on the retake, and a worse answer the second time can score lower than the first. On an exam that is mostly multiple choice this never comes up. On one built out of multiple-answer or matching items, look at the second attempts before you post grades.

06 Giving back only a portion of the total

Plenty of teachers want the middle ground: the retake should count for something, but not for everything. Canvas has exactly one built-in way to do that — Average — and on a full retake it cuts both ways (see the warning in section 04). For anything else you set Score to keep to Highest and adjust the handful of scores yourself. Three ways. The first two are quick to explain and quick to enter; the third is the one that answers the fairness argument in section 01 outright.

A ceiling — simplest, and easy to explain

Tell them the retake can lift the grade as high as 85 and no higher. Afterward you type 85 into the gradebook for the students who cleared it, and leave everyone else alone. No arithmetic, one number to announce, and it is obvious to a student why it is fair.

Half the gain — more precise

Everyone keeps half of what they earned back: original + half the improvement. A 60 that retakes to 90 becomes a 75; a 70 that retakes to 80 becomes a 75. Rewards the size of the effort rather than crossing a line. For more than a few students, use the spreadsheet route below.

A ceiling at the cutoff — nobody overtakes anyone

If you invited everyone at or below 75, cap the retake at 75. Then no student who was offered a second attempt can finish above a student who was not, and the complaint from the ones just above the line disappears entirely — arithmetically, not just rhetorically. The catch: a student sitting at 74 can gain one point, so they will not bother, while a student at 40 gains thirty-five. It rewards having done badly rather than the work done since. If that bothers you, half the gain is the fix.

On a New Quiz, don't type the new score in Grades. The quiz can put its own score back later, when you change its settings or regrade. Add the difference as Fudge Points in SpeedGrader instead. How →

One teacher’s rule, worked through: any quiz can be retaken for up to 90

The retake can lift a grade as high as 90 and no higher, and it never pulls a grade down. With Score to keep set to Highest, Canvas already handles the “never down” part.

First try	Retake	Grade recorded	Why
62	95	90	Capped at 90
72	84	84	Under the cap, so it counts in full
88	83	88	A retake never lowers a grade
93	—	93	Didn’t retake; nothing changes

In Excel, with the first try in column H and the retake in column I: =MAX(H2,MIN(I2,90)). If your rule is 10 points off the retake instead: =MAX(H2,I2-10). Then mark each student Retake so you can see who took it.

You do not have to write the old scores down first. Canvas keeps every attempt. In SpeedGrader there is a dropdown at the top of each student's submission that switches between attempt 1 and attempt 2, and clicking a gradebook cell and opening its detail tray shows the same history. The before-grade is always recoverable, even after the retake has posted.

Doing the arithmetic for a whole class — export the gradebook, work in Excel, import it back · about ten minutes, done twice

Clicking through students one at a time is fine for five of them and miserable for thirty. The gradebook will do the carrying for you. You export a spreadsheet, do one column of arithmetic, and upload it again.

Before you open the retakes — take the snapshot

In your course, open Grades.
Click Export at the top right, then Export Entire Gradebook.
A CSV lands in your Downloads. Rename it something you will recognize — Exam 1 before retake.csv. These are your before-grades, and this step is the whole reason the rest is easy.

After the retake window closes — do the math

Export the gradebook again. Open both files in Excel.
Copy the exam column out of the before file and paste it beside the exam column in the new one, so the two sit side by side.
In the exam column of the new file, write the blend. If the before-score is in column H and the after-score in column I, then half the gain is =H2+(I2-H2)/2, and a ceiling is =MIN(I2,85) — swap 85 for your cutoff if you are using the cutoff as the ceiling. Fill it down the column.
Delete every other assignment column except the student name and ID columns and the one you changed. Canvas only updates what you send it, and a smaller file is easier to check.
Save it as CSV.

Put it back

Back in Grades, click Import, choose your file and upload it.
Canvas shows you every cell that will change, side by side with what is there now. Read that screen — it is your undo.
Click Save Changes.

One thing to watch. Do the import after the retake window has shut. A submission arriving afterward recalculates the cell and wipes what you typed.

Canvas guide: exporting the gradebook →
Canvas guide: importing grades →
Canvas guide: the gradebook, including the detail tray →
A grade total looks wrong — what to check →

If the spreadsheet part is not your idea of an afternoon, it is a ten-minute job to sit and do together. Ask.

Short on time? Hand this to AI. Don’t give it the gradebook file; that has student names in it. Give it your rule and your two columns, and it writes the formula and talks you through the export and import. Copy this into ChatGPT for Teachers or Claude and change the words in brackets to your rule:

I use Canvas and want to adjust quiz grades after retakes, using a gradebook export in Excel. Column H is each student’s score before the retake and column I is the score after.

My rule: [a retake can raise the grade to 90 at most, and never lowers it].

1. Write one Excel formula for row 2 that I can fill down the column.
2. Show it working on four made-up scores so I can check it.
3. Walk me through exporting my gradebook from Canvas, which columns to delete before I import it back, and what to check on the import preview screen. One step at a time, and wait for me after each step.

Before you import, check the formula by hand on two of your own students. Never paste student names or work.

07 Three things that will catch you out

Hand-graded questions need the checkmark

An essay or file upload is only “correct” to Canvas when you press the checkmark button on it in SpeedGrader. Typing in full points does not do it, and a question Canvas does not consider correct comes back on the retake. Mark them before you open the second attempt.

Item banks plus Average has been reported broken

Teachers in the Canvas community have reported Build on Last Attempt failing to open the second attempt when the quiz pulls questions randomly from an item bank and Score to keep is set to Average. If your exam is built that way, use Highest and test the retake in Student View first.

Decide when the retake closes, and say so

An extra attempt sits there until the quiz’s Until date passes. Give the retake its own window and tell students the date, or you will still be collecting second attempts in three weeks. It also matters for your grading: if you are adjusting scores by hand or by spreadsheet (section 06), do it after the window has shut — a late submission recalculates the cell and wipes what you entered.

08 Or do not reopen the exam at all

There is a version of this that never touches the quiz. Make a separate assignment — Exam 1 Corrections — and use Assign To to give it to only those students, so it never appears on anyone else's To Do list. They submit the corrected work and you grade it by hand. The exam score is never touched, the partial credit is whatever you say it is, and you can ask them to explain the error rather than just fix it. More of your time, less of Canvas's cleverness — and on a short exam it is often the faster route.

09 Every guide on this page, in one place

From Canvas

Settings for a quiz in New Quizzes →
The Moderate page in New Quizzes →
Exporting the gradebook →
Importing grades →
Using the gradebook →

From here

Quiz Recovery — when it went wrong rather than by design →
Canvas Quizzes — the whole reference →
Extended time and accommodations — the other tab of that panel →
Student View — test the retake before they see it →
Who to ask →

Attempts set to 1 in Settings. Additional Attempts set to 1 in Moderate, for the students you choose. Nobody else sees a thing.

Jason Beyer · Educational Technology · Regis Jesuit High School · A.M.D.G.

HelpDesk@regisjesuit.com · 303.269.8080 · LAST VERIFIED — 18 SEP 2026