Timing for Canvas quizzes can be set up in a variety of ways.

If you are using a timer for a Canvas quiz, you need to ensure that the students are given enough time to complete the quiz.

When creating a quiz, the option to time-limit the quiz is available in the Settings tab of the quiz, under Time Limit. When Time Limit is turned on, a set number of hours and minutes can be set.

Note: The time only begins counting down when students begin the quiz, whenever they click to start the quiz.


It is recommended to set only the Available from time for a quiz in Canvas (the date and time at which it becomes available to students) and to set the Until time (the date and time it becomes unavailable to them) as the time at which the quiz should end.

Some staff choose to allow some additional time (via the Until setting) to allow students e.g. 5 - 10 additional minutes to login, setup, etc. For instance, if a quiz is scheduled to run from 11:00 to 12:00, setting the until time to 12:05 allows students a 5 minute "buffer" in case they encounter technical difficulties when starting.

In order to set the Available From/ Until time, you can simply click into the quiz and  set this up while creating the quiz, and from the options area which appears, it is possible to adjust the Available from time and Until time for the quiz. 

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Based on all of the above, if one had a quiz which should be available to students at 11:00 and end at 12:00, you may have the following settings:

  • Time Limit: 1 hour
  • Available from: 11:00
  • Until: 12:00 / 12:05
Based on the above settings, students would be able to begin the quiz at 11:00, would have 1 hour to complete from the time they begin, but the quiz will become unavailable after 12:00 / 12:05. The logs in the moderate section of the quiz settings will also indicate the times at which students begun and completed a quiz attempt.

If you wish to ensure that students only have a specific window of time in which to launch the quiz, you can enforce this by simply unpublishing the quiz after a specific amount of time has passed (e.g. 5-10 minutes after the quiz was due to begin).

Any students who have started the quiz will still be able to submit and any students who have not yet started the quiz will not be able to begin.