The Instructure Community will enter a read-only state on November 22, 2025 as we prepare to migrate to our new Community platform in early December. Read our blog post for more info about this change.
For various reasons it would be great if it was possible to reject a solution for an assignment.
Reason could be that the student uploaded a wrong file, or that score was so low that a resubmission is required.
It seems there is no feature for this in Canvas?
This also means that the section with due assignments is wrong for above students.
Have you been missing the same functionality?
Anyone with a workaround?
Kind regards,
Michael
Hey @mje ,
Students can re-submit to an assignment as many times as they need to provided the assignment is a) not set up to lock (no "until" date set), b) before the "until" date. In the event that either of this is the case you could use differentiated dates to allow the student to turn it in past the "until" date. You are also able to change the grade on the assignment as many times as you need.
So, my recommendation would be to give the student a 0 and add a comment that this submission has been rejected but will be regraded once they submit properly. The only thing it won't do that you mentioned was cause the assignment to show back up on their To Do feed. It will make their total grade in the course drop and in my experience that is as powerful if not more powerful than the To Do feed for getting student's attention. However, there is also a feature idea called, that was pretty popular and may be considered for development in the future. I would encourage you to check it out and add any thoughts you have to the comments for reference later.
Here are some relevant guides for the workaround I described:
Can a student resubmit any assignment?
How do I find a student submission in SpeedGrader?
What is the difference between assignment due dates and availability dates?
What do assignments with different due dates look like in Canvas?
Let me know if this will work or if there's anything else we can help you out with.
Thanks for the quick feedback!
I'm aware of the possibility of resubmissions, but it doesn't solve the issue.
Maybe I could do something with the grade = 0, but it also doesn't really solve the issue. Reason is that a lot of research shows that grading is demotivating for students. They tend to focus on grades instead of skills. Hence I often don't want to grade assignments.
Thanks for pointing to the (archived) idea. Unfortunately it feels like the ideas / voting system is ignored by the decision makers in Instructure/Canvas and hence a waste of our time - even when ideas get 150+ votes. Maybe I'm wrong - I hope I am - can you show me an idea that was actually implemented? recently?
Kind regards,
Michael
@mje , when you navigate to the Feature Ideas space, you can see all of the ideas submitted by the Community that have been marked as complete. From the Community home page, click on Feature Ideas; then scroll down to the green Completed button, and click on it to see the list. That list encompasses those ideas that have been marked "completed" since the new (Jive-based) Canvas Community was formed in April 2015.
Thanks Stefanie!
It's nice to see the progress.
Sorting by latest activity I can see that only 3 out of 20 completed ideas have more votes than the feature we are discussing here. So obviously the number of votes isn't that important to what gets implemented.
Is there anything that can be done to get another view on an idea that has been archived?
Kind regards,
Michael
Hi @mje , the critical threshold is 100--so once a feature idea has received 100 votes, the product team is obligated to respond to it. Putting that differently, and to address your observation directly, an idea that gets 101 votes from the Community is treated in the same fashion as an idea that gets 151 votes.
Feature idea voting is only one of several ways Canvas decides what to implement and when to implement it. You can read more about the feature implementation process at Ideas: State of the Union. This section is especially germane to your question:
Our product team puts a lot of time, energy, and emphasis in reading and understanding your ideas; and they put all of your excellent explanations and use cases together with the feedback of CSMs (admin perspective), Support (end user perspective), Sales (new client perspective), Engineers (development perspective), their own visits and interviews (mixed perspective), and Instructure Leadership (big goals and budget perspective) to fully evaluate priority, need, and available resources. They then take all of those perspectives, priorities, needs, and resources, and set the product roadmap! All of this is a long winded way to explain why there are sometimes ideas that did not reach the 100 vote threshold that are developed before those that did. Simply put; there are multiple inputs driving roadmap prioritization (although our product managers have enthusiastically said that the Community is an accurate representation of the needs and priorities they hear on site-visits and in interviews - Yeah to you for representing!)
Even if an idea is archived, that doesn't mean it's not on the product team's radar. In fact, once an idea has received a comment from the product team, it is no longer necessary to submit it to the Community for a new round of consideration.
If you have a particular idea or ideas that you're keen on, your best approach is to add your feedback to the comments section and "follow" it to keep informed of its progress through the development process. And feel free to join the Meta Community Group group if you'd like to offer suggestions on how to improve the feature idea process in particular and the Community in general.
Community helpTo interact with Panda Bot, our automated chatbot, you need to sign up or log in:
Sign inTo interact with Panda Bot, our automated chatbot, you need to sign up or log in:
Sign in
This discussion post is outdated and has been archived. Please use the Community question forums and official documentation for the most current and accurate information.