[ARCHIVED] Missing Assignments Indicator

[baileyc]

Can marking assignments missing being disabled? I have assignments that some students submit to, but mostly I manually enter the grade. I'm noticing that for students whose grade was manually added without a submission from them it is marked missing. #missing

[awilliams · Accepted solution]

Hey  @baileyc ‌, it sounds like maybe you still have the "Submission Type" set to "Online" for those assignments you intend to manually grade. Have you tried changing the submission type to "On Paper" or "No Submission" to see if that affects the "Missing" indicator? Here are a few community resources for assignments that would help with editing assignment details.

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10113-415241285 

[awilliams · Accepted solution]

Ahh, I see. In the event of online submission types that you want to also allow "on paper" I don't think there's any way to tell Canvas it was turned in that way instead of just "missing." That would be a new feature (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-2109-how-does-the-voting-process-work-for-feature-ideas?sr=...‌)

However, if you allow "Text Entry" as a submission option, the students could just type in "I turned this in to you on paper on Thursday, Aug. 3rd" or something. After grading them you should be free of the missing label then. Would that work for you?

[James · Accepted solution]

If it's graded, obviously its not missing. 

I can think of circumstances where this may not be true. Some people go through and put in zeros once an assignment is due to give an extra nudge to the students who haven't submitted it. Others go through and put in zeros for everything at the beginning of the term because they want the percent to build towards 100% rather than reflecting what has been graded so far. Technically, those are still missing, even if there is no longer an opportunity for the student to turn it in.

You might be able to say that a positive grade means it has been submitted, but you can't infer the same for a zero as it's possible that the student turned it in on paper and got a 0 for whatever reason. This discussion kind of reminds me of the text messages that Canvas sent out in the spring where many were up in arms about the wording. That test run has turned into Nudge (see InstCon0017 Product Announcements ) which is going through more testing before it's generally available.

As this is a new featureCanvas Production Release Notes (2017-08-05), it's possible that some refinement will need to be done.  @ProfessorBeyrer ‌ has already made a feature request to suppress this behavior for 0 point assignments. There was also a healthy discussion of it in the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-07-24), where Erin Hallmark made the comment that manually grading does not change the label and that you can check out future features in Priority: Gradebook Enhancements.

As for now, as it was in the past, educating students and informing them of what things mean can go along way towards alleviating misunderstandings and stress: "Missing means that you didn't submit it through Canvas and that's all it means. You should ignore this if you turned it in on paper." But I can guarantee that students are still going to freak out and forget what you told them.  Either that or it's going to happen so much that it loses its usefulness.

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Either that or it's going to happen so much that it loses its usefulness.

Exactly! That's my main concern with this right now. It will get to the point that an otherwise useful feature will just be ignored unless faculty are somehow able to override its behavior.

[laurakgibbs]

Exactly! In addition to specific bug reports, there was so much that came out in these discussions about different grading practices and how people use the Gradebook. I learned a lot! And as I've said elsewhere, I really hope Canvas will keep in mind the MANY different ways people use the Gradebook. I know it is not easy to build a system that fits everyone, but I hope we will have the opportunity to opt in/out of specific features and/or configure those features to fit our needs.

[jonesn16]

This is great, erinhallmark‌! Its this kind of responsiveness and community interaction that has made me so enthusiastic about our move to Canvas. 

[slb74]

Hi Erin, You mention that the "New Gradebook can be currently be turned off at any time if needed."  Are there instructions that demonstrate how to do that?

Thanks!

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, Suzanne,

The New Gradebook is managed as a feature option enabled on a course-by-course basis. For your course, open Course Settings and click the Feature Options tab. If it's enabled, you'll see the New Gradebook feature option; toggle the button so it is turned off (gray X instead of the green check mark).

Hope that helps!

Erin

[joseph_allen]

erinhallmark do you happen to know if the missing / late labels will be removed from the Canvas Parent mobile app as well?

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, Joe,

The mobile team does not quite have that change ready to go but they are working on it!

Thanks,

Erin

[Cindy_Perry]

Can you not create a code that makes the missing label go away when a grade is manually entered? Google classroom gradebook does that.

[whites]

My students’ work is marked missing even when I set the assignment type to “on paper”. This is really confusing for students.

[joseph_allen]

 @whites  are you on the new gradebook or the old gradebook?  It shouldn't do that either way, but I'm just curious.   We have opted to not roll out the new gradebook because you can't export grades for one grading period which is a deal breaker.  That said, I thought all the missing assignment tag stuff was resolved.  

[whites]

I am using the old gradebook.

[kimberly_smith1]

Hello Joe,

In my view, the missing assignments indicator stuff is only sort of resolved because, in many cases, the manual management of these in the New Gradebook will be both confusing for students and time consuming for instructors. You may be interested in visiting https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10605-a-global-option-to-enabledisable-missing-and-late-status... 

[jchalfant]

Hi Joe,

We are also using the old/original gradebook and are suffering because of "false Missings" being posted to the parent app. Did you ever get this resolved?

FWIW, I also work in K12 and share your concerns. This is a very serious issue! I'm extemely disappointed that Instructure has still not addressed this. (We were dealing with this last year also.) The picture below shows the latest Canvas Parent apps (Android left, iOS right) and the Canvas Student app in the middle. The assignment Submission Type is "No Submission" and has been graded.

This is an obvious bug in the iOS Parent app. Why is it not being addressed???

-J

[zb7]

amen