[ARCHIVED] Assignment Points Automatically Adjusted to Match Total Points?

[MalenaM]

A 30-question assignment was created with each question worth one point. The assignment is worth 100 points. Will a student only get 30 points if they answer each question correctly, even though the assignment is worth 100 points? Or does Canvas adjust to make the 30 correct out of 30 equal the 100 points?

I have to remove one of the questions, which will now make an assignment with 29 questions, and each worth 1 point. Do I need to make any adjustments to the individual points or total assignment points to make sure a student gets the appropriate credit?

[Ron_Bowman]

@MalenaM -

Is this an assignment?  Or is it a quiz?  It sounds like a quiz where you have each question worth 1 point.  If you want the quiz to be 100 points total, you will have to edit the questions on the quiz so that the points total to 100 if you want it to be 100 points.

If this is an actual assignment that you have to grade the 30 questions, then you would just enter in whatever the students score out of 100 is.

[MalenaM]

It's an assignment. A coworker and I have experimented with an assignment worth 50 points. Even if individual points only total 2.7 points, a student who gets one of the two questions right earns 31.48 points. So the total points given exceeds the total individual points. I've seen this a few times, but others state the individual points need to total the assignments for proper grading. I'm wondering if that's true and our experiment was a fluke or if Canvas is automatically adjusting to the show the correct credit earned.

 

[Ron_Bowman]

@MalenaM -

I am confused (which is not hard to do to me).  Are you using a rubric for grading the assignment?  

[MalenaM]

No. The assignment uses a New Quiz, so it's auto-graded.

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@MalenaM I think the confusion comes from when @Ron_Bowman asked if it was a quiz or assignment the answer should have been "quiz".  Yes, new quizzes show in the assignment area of Canvas but they are still a quiz.  The main difference is there is no auto-grading to assignments so a student would earn whatever score you entered.

Since you are using New Quizzes, Canvas should be doing the math based on what value you created the quiz to be worth and what point value you made each question.  In your initial post, you said 30 questions each worth 1 point but the total score was 100.  In this situation each question really would be worth 3.33 (100/30) points.  When you removed the 1 question making it 29 questions, that should have then made each question worth 3.45 (100/29) points.

Not really sure what you then mean in your reply but the math will work out the same where it is taking the total and dividing it by the points you assigned to each question to work out the math.

Hope this helps!

-Nick

[MalenaM]

So when a new quiz is used as an assignment, are the assignment possible points not actually used for anything when Canvas calculates the grade?

[Ron_Bowman]

@MalenaM 

@nwilson7 clarified my confusion.

So you have a quiz that has a number of questions worth 1 point each.  You made the Quiz worth 100 points. (quiz total can be different from the points allocated to the questions) 

The grade that you are seeing should be the percentage score of the questions times  points possible (based on my test and what nwilson7 stated).  so if they scored 25/30 on the quiz questions, then their score should be an 83.33 (25/30 = 0.833 and 0.833*100 = 83.33)

As for the confusion on assignments and quizzes.  All graded work goes under the assignment umbrella in Canvas.  However, there are different types of assignments.  A regular assignment, quizzes, discussions or external tools.  

The assignment points are used for the grade calculation.  If you have a quiz worth 100 points, a discussion worth 100 points and a regular assignment worth 100 points, The total score will be out of 300 points possible.  So for my quiz above 83.33 of the 300 points would come from getting 25/30 questions correct.

[nwilson7]

That is where the base number comes from so it is used.  Back to the example you initially used, the 100 was the assignment score so that is the number Canvas used to determine what each individual question was worth.