Edited Google Form while users were responding - how to recover initial responses?

Question

I have utilized Google Forms to create a mid-term exam for my students. However, after they started taking the quiz, I went in to edit and simply added a section after the first question and now, after the students have submitted their responses, nothing is showing up in either the "responses" tab on Google Forms nor in the spreadsheet. I took the exam after making the change and my responses are showing up. Thus, it looks like I was the only one that selected any responses. The only response that is showing up is the students' responses to the first question (which I made into a password). Thus, I know that their responses are recorded, they're just not showing up in my version of the form.

Thus, my question is whether or not I can revert to earlier versions of the Google Form so that I can actually see their responses and create a spreadsheet from them? Two reasons I am confident the responses have been recorded are that I literally saw a students' screen before they submitted and every question was populated with a response when they submitted and another students' screen showed the message "successfully recorded."

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. I truly hope I don't have to ask the students to take the exam again!

Answer 1

Assuming you didn't delete the responses that were already recorded you can absolutely recover them.

1. Open the form
2. Click the "Responses" tab
3. Click the Vertical ... menu
4. If you hadn't linked your responses to a spreadsheet click the "Select Response Destination" option. If it was linked to a spreadsheet, click "Change Response Destination."
5. Either create a new spreadsheet or select an existing spreadsheet depending on whether or not you had already linked to a sheet (it would create a new form responses tab if you link to existing.)

When the sheet is created it will automatically populate it with all responses that were ever received by the form.

Answer 2

Short answer

Thus, my question is whether or not I can revert to earlier versions of the Google Form so that I can actually see their responses and create a spreadsheet from them?

It's not possible "to revert" a Google Form to an old version, but it' could be possible that you spreadsheet revision history has the answers summitted.

Explanation

In contrary as occurs with Google Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, Google Forms doesn't include a revision history, so it's not possible to automatically revert a form to a previous state, so if you do a change and want to revert it, you should do remove all the additions, to add all the removed questions, etc.

Regarding the responses data, there isn't a revision history for the built-in response repository, but Google spreadsheets have it, so it could possible that the responses submitted previous to the Form change is there.