Your school runs one of two Canvas quiz engines, and most students never find out which until something behaves unexpectedly. They look almost identical while you are taking a quiz. Underneath they are separate products, built by different teams, that record what you do in completely different ways.
How to tell which one you are taking
The fastest tell is the address bar. A Classic Quiz lives at a URL containing /quizzes/ followed by a number. A New Quiz is technically an assignment, so its URL contains /assignments/ instead, and the quiz loads inside that page.
The second tell is the interface. Classic renders as a plain list of questions in Canvas's own styling, with a Quiz Instructions block at the top and a question-navigation box in the sidebar. New Quizzes looks different: a slim left rail with numbered question buttons, a pin icon on each question, and its Submit button in the top right rather than at the bottom of the page.
The differences that actually affect you
1. One question at a time behaves differently
Both engines can show one question per page. In Classic, moving between questions reloads the page. New Quizzes is a single-page app, so questions swap instantly. That sounds cosmetic, but it changes what exists on the page at any moment: in one-at-a-time mode only the current question is in the document at all.
2. Backtracking can be switched off
New Quizzes lets instructors disable backtracking, so once you move forward you cannot return to an earlier question. Classic has no clean equivalent. If you normally skip hard questions and circle back, check this before you start.
3. The question types are not identical
New Quizzes added formats Classic never had, including hot spot, ordering and categorisation. It also changed how fill-in-the-blank matching works. If your instructor migrated an old quiz across, some questions may have converted imperfectly.
4. Your attempt is recorded differently
This is the biggest invisible difference. Classic posts a batch of events back to Canvas as you work: a session start, each question viewed, each question flagged, and whether the page lost or regained focus. Those are the entries an instructor reads in the quiz log.
New Quizzes does not use that system. It streams its telemetry to a separate analytics pipeline outside Canvas's own quiz-log endpoints, and it records your IP address, which instructors with the right permission can see. The practical result is that the two engines produce different logs, surfaced on different screens. An instructor fluent in one may not know where to find the other.
Which one is harder?
Neither is harder by itself, but New Quizzes gives instructors more levers: backtracking locks, per-question time limits, shuffled answer options, and question banks that serve a random subset to each student. If a course moved from Classic to New Quizzes and the quizzes suddenly feel less predictable, that is usually why. Not the questions, the settings now available around them.
Why your school might be on either
Instructure has been retiring Classic Quizzes for years, with the deadline pushed back more than once. Many institutions run both: older courses on Classic, newer ones built in New Quizzes. Some instructors stayed on Classic deliberately because its quiz log is more detailed and easier to read. So "my school uses X" is usually really "this course uses X".
What this means for studying
Three practical takeaways. Check the URL before a graded attempt so you know which engine you are in. If it is New Quizzes, find out whether backtracking is enabled before you plan your pacing. And do not assume the practice quiz and the real exam use the same engine or settings, because instructors frequently build them separately.
They do not even report your activity the same way
This is the deepest difference between the two engines and the one almost no guide covers, because it is invisible unless you watch the network traffic. The two engines do not just store different things; they use entirely different plumbing to send them.
Classic posts a batch of events
Classic Quizzes collects events in your browser and posts them back to Canvas periodically, to an address of the form /courses/<id>/quizzes/<id>/submissions/<id>/events. The client sends a small, fixed set of event types: the session starting, a question being viewed, a question being flagged, and the page gaining or losing focus.
There is a detail here that trips people up. "Answered question" is not one of the events your browser sends. The server derives it from the autosave that stores your answer. That is why an attempt log can show answers without the matching views: the answer arrives through the save path, the view arrives through the event path, and they are genuinely separate channels.
One more quirk worth knowing: Canvas queues these events in your browser's local storage and only clears the queue when the server confirms receipt. If delivery fails, it retries. A flaky connection mid-quiz does not usually lose your activity log; it delays it.
New Quizzes streams somewhere else entirely
New Quizzes does not post an event feed to Canvas at all. It requests temporary credentials from Canvas and then streams telemetry directly to Amazon Kinesis, a data-streaming service, on AWS infrastructure rather than your institution's Canvas host.
The practical consequences for you as a student are modest but real. The data takes a different path and can surface in the instructor's view on a different schedule. And because New Quizzes renders its questions inside an embedded frame built on a separate assessment platform, the page you are looking at is not structured like a Classic quiz page at all, even when it looks similar.
What each one records
| Classic Quizzes | New Quizzes | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-question view timing | Granular | Coarser |
| Page focus lost / regained | Yes, explicitly | Not surfaced the same way |
| Your IP address | Not in the quiz log | Yes |
| Answer change history | Yes | Yes |
| Where the data goes | Your Canvas host | AWS stream, then Canvas |
Neither log is the surveillance apparatus students imagine, and neither is nothing. Instructure's own documentation states plainly that quiz log data is not intended to validate academic integrity and cannot establish what a student actually did.
Settings that behave differently
If you have taken quizzes in both engines and felt that one was stricter, you were probably reacting to these:
- Backtracking. New Quizzes lets an instructor stop you returning to earlier questions. Classic has no direct equivalent, and this single setting accounts for most of the "it felt harsher" reaction.
- One question at a time. Both support it, but it pairs with the backtracking lock in New Quizzes, which makes it far more restrictive.
- Partial credit. New Quizzes is considerably more flexible on multi-select scoring, so a half-right answer is more likely to earn something.
- Question types. New Quizzes adds types Classic never had, including categorisation, ordering and hot-spot questions.
- Moderation. Extra time and extra attempts are granted through different screens, which is why an instructor sometimes takes a while to find the right one.
Why your school is on one or the other
Instructure has been migrating institutions from Classic to New Quizzes for years, and the timeline has moved repeatedly. The practical result is a long transition in which both engines coexist: an instructor may have older Classic quizzes still in a course alongside newer ones built in New Quizzes, and a department can be mid-migration while another is not.
This is also why a practice quiz and the real exam can behave differently. They may simply have been built in different engines, by the same instructor, months apart.
Frequently asked questions
Can I choose which quiz engine to take?
No. The instructor picks when they build the quiz, and the choice is invisible to you until you open it.
Does New Quizzes track more than Classic?
It records different things rather than strictly more. It captures your IP address, which Classic's quiz log does not surface the same way, while Classic is more granular about per-question viewing.
Why did my answers disappear when I went back?
Almost always backtracking being disabled in New Quizzes, or a session timing out. Both engines save as you go, so a vanished answer usually means you are looking at a new attempt rather than the original.
Do both engines auto-save?
Yes. Both save continuously rather than only on submit, which is why a browser crash rarely loses everything.
Does one engine grade more harshly?
No, but New Quizzes handles partial credit on multi-select questions more generously, so the same answers can score slightly differently.
Why does my quiz look different from my classmate's?
Usually a different engine, a different setting such as shuffled answers, or both. Instructors can also build multiple versions of the same assessment.