[ARCHIVED] [ARCHIVED] Removing a student from a group assignment after submissions

[Heather-Ryan]

I have an instructor that has a course long group assignment and wants 2 students removed from their groups for non participation. She wants these students to no longer have access to the group discussions, etc. Cloning the group leaves them access to the previous group, so that does not work. Has anyone had any negative results with removing a student from a group (changing an existing group)?

Thanks so much!

Heather Ryan - New LMS Admin

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @Heather-Ryan ‌ - My first suggestion for this--as the new LMS administrator that you are--is to try doing this very thing on either your Test or Beta servers to see what happens.  See How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an admin? or How do I access the Canvas test environment as an admin?   And actually, this is the ideal time to do this.  Since we just had a release this past weekend, both servers have been recently "refreshed" and will have relatively up to date data in them from the class.  That's one benefit to Test and Beta: you can do "harm" in a "live" class but not in the actual class itself, since it won't affect your production installation.  Check the gradebook for the course in question after doing this to see if there are after-effects, and then try to masquerade as one of the students in question.  (Check How do I act as another user in an account? if you've never done this before.)  I can say that any group discussion work will still have any discussions that the students may have participated in; it's not like they get wiped out.  As for any submissions that they did have?  Keep reading below...

But to directly answer your concern, I do not think there will be too many bad side effects.  As a fellow Canvas administrator I have tried out similar situations, though not for a "live" class I must admit...but rather to answer somewhat similar questions in this very Community.  See Removing a Student from a Group and Removing a student from a group assignment for two examples.  There is an interesting side effect to all this, though, in that students who are NOT in a group can still participate in group assignments, though I admit I have not tried this out myself.  But look at https://community.canvaslms.com/message/62626-grading-submissions-for-students-not-assigned-to-a-gro... .  (Then again, if they haven't participated, none of this may be a problem.)

But, as I said, the end result may be that not too much happens, other than the fact they will no longer have access to the group in question.  But DO try this scenario out in Test or Beta and let us know what happens.