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.
At this point in time, I realize that Canvas will automatically fill in late/missing for me if I have a submission that is Canvas based. However, if there is an external tool assignment or something that I am manually entering (on paper or other site not supported in external tools), then I must manually select late/missing/excused in the grade book for each individual student. It takes an OBSENE amount of time.
Has anyone discovered an add-on or other work around?
The only other post I saw on this was that it was "solved" but the solution was that Canvas does this automatically for us...which is not the case in all situations.
As a development, I would love to see Canvas allow that teachers can type in "mi", "L", or "ex" as keyboard short cuts or create a way to mass mark students who "haven't been graded yet".
Any thoughts appreciated!
You can type in ex for excused. I am not aware of a similar code for missing or late. However, you can auto enter zeros for all missing submissions (without a label) as soon as the current submissions are all graded. To do that select "set default grade" from the three dot menu of that assignment in grades. (Make sure you do not check the box for overwriting current grades. If you do want to add a missing label, you can sort grades from lowest to highest, to put all of the zeros together. You will still need to apply the label one at a time, however. Future submissions that you want to apply a late policy to will also still need to have the late label added when you grade those. It's not much of a work-around.
You might want to contribute to these idea conversations:
I really would like the option to have type M for missing and L for late.
If you're still having this issue, you can type MI for missing. You can also enter that into the "default grade" using the 3 dots at the top of the score column, and it will enter missing for all students without a score.
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This discussion post is outdated and has been archived.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.