Some students may require additional time to sit time-limited assessment as part of a reasonable accommodations or additional support. To facilitate this, there are a number of different approaches which you can use.


Allowing for retrospective provision of reasonable accommodation

If you do wish to provide extra time for students who may require this, a suggested general approach to do so may be to allow for retrospective provision of reasonable accommodation.

This would essentially involve allowing submissions after the assignment due date to accommodate students who have undeclared accommodation entitlements or who may encounter real-time technical or operational issues that might need to be accommodated on appeal or in retrospect.

All late submissions will be marked for your review but no automatic penalties will be applied by Canvas.

This can be the better option as it means students who qualify for extra time but who were not identified in advance of the assessment can be retrospectively accommodated.


Creating an alternative Canvas assessment with additional time added

You can create a Canvas assignment with additional time added and make this assignment available only to the relevant student or students requiring it.

If it is required to offer a modified version of a Canvas assignment or Canvas quiz to only a single student or small group of students (who may, for instance, require some additional time or alterations to the assessment process), you could either:

  1. Create a separate assignment
  2. Duplicate an existing assignment. This can be performed by clicking on the right-hand menu for an assignment and selecting Duplicate. This will provide a copy of the assessment to work with


When you have created a separate assignment, you can make said assignment available to only a single student or small group of students by assigning it  to just them. To do this, edit the assignment and find the Assign to section at the end of the page



By default, the Assign to setting is set to "everyone" in the module. You can delete this and replace this with a single student or group of students


Moderating a Canvas Quiz to allow for an alternative time limit

You can moderate assessment settings for individual students in New Quizzes prior to students taking the exam.

Moderation settings apply only to the assessment you are moderating (and to a specific student in that assessment) and can include reopening assessment attempts and managing timer settings. Reopening a student's assessment will reopen a student's most recent attempt.

For guidelines on the process of moderating a quiz, please see the guidelines here.