[ARCHIVED] Exceeding 100%

[djamesfitz]

Parapro here — I'm working with an instructor whose offline policy is to have a group of small weekly assignments, adding up to 75 points, that is only graded out of 50. A student could, therefore, theoretically accrue up to 150% of the 'value' of these points (although they'd only get 100% credit for the work). The instructor does this so that students can voluntarily skip some of these assignments without it affecting their grades at all.

Is there any way to get Canvas to reflect this policy? Intuitively, I think there must be something you could do with Assignment Groups and weighting that would replicate this math, but I can't quite work it out. Has anybody tried something like this? Do you have any suggestions? 

[rmurchshafer · Accepted solution]

You can't exactly do that, but you can have Assignment Groups ignore the x number of lowest scores.  So with your example if there are 15 assignments worth 5 points each, put them all in a single Assignment Group and set it to ignore the lowest five.  Keep in mind that a blank grade is not a lowest grade, so all blanks would need to have 0s added at some point  to ensure they get dropped.  

This isn't exactly what you are looking for because I assume in your example a student  could get 4 out of 5 on all 15 assignments and score 70/75, which would translate to 50 points.  In my example dropping the lowest  five, the student would only have 40 points.  

To really accomplish you example some manual grading might be needed.  Put all of those Assignments into an Assignment Group weighted at 0%, so they don't really count at all.  They are just records.  Then at the end of the semester create a single Assignment to hold their grade and enter their total points (max 50) into it.

Rick