Limiting a student grade to a maximum score

[JohnKern]

Hello Garth,

I am a new user and I work for a police academy here in Las Vegas Nevada. I am one of the Academy administrators that works over the grading and coursework. My question is how do we allow a student to retake an exam and limit the maximum grade on the retake exam to 80%. For example, Joe takes an exam and scores less than the Academy minimum grade of 80% so for this example he scored 70% on the exam, we then go into the system and allow a single retake or attempt at the same test. If Joe scores 100% on the test, we would like to only allow him to have a maximum score of 80% regardless of his 100% correct answers. The reason for this calculation is we want to make sure that it is fair for the other students who are also competing for high GPA scores for awards at the Academy. It would not be fair if Sally took the test and scored an 80%, and Joe on his first attempt a scored a 70 and second attempt scored a 100 which would average 85% which would appear that he had done better than Sally when in fact Sally had a passing grade on the first attempt.

Sgt. John Kern

[Ron_Bowman]

@JohnKern 

If you want all students to take the quiz by a certain time before the second attempt can be given, then you could set the due date for the first attempt and the until date as the end time for the second attempt.  Any attempt after the due date is then marked late.  You could then use the following:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-apply-a-Late-Submission-policy-in-the-G...

To set up a late submission grading penalty that would limit the second attempt to 80%.  You would have to set the quiz to keep the most recent submission in this case.

[gnoack]

@JohnKern and @Ron_Bowman 

I'm not sure a late submission policy would work in this case.  My understanding is that the policy deducts points based on time, not score. I don't see a way to set a late policy that would automatically change the grade of any late work scored over 80% as 80%. 

It might be easier to simply override the score of the second attempt by entering 80% in the gradebook after students complete it.  Or, depending on how your course points and gradebook are setup, you might duplicate the quiz and give it a maximum point total as 80% of the original.  You'd have to zero out the first attempt somehow, and perhaps count the second as extra-credit. 

[Ron_Bowman]

@gnoack 

I don't use the late policy grading, so I was not aware of the graduated point deduction.  I just assumed you could say late is late and here is the penalty.  It would be nice if both options were available.

[Ron_Bowman]

@JohnKern @gnoack 

I just looked through the document that I referenced.  I think it will work depending on when the students are allowed to take the exam again and how long they have to take it.  Make the late penalty 1 day and 20% per day.  According to the example in the document, the 20% penalty is calculated as 20% of the max score (i.e 80 would be the maximum if the test is worth 100) - Canvas calculates the grade for the test and then the 20% value is subtracted from it.  see the screenshot below which applies a 10% penalty for each day late:

For this case, I think it boils down to what is the time frame for students who need to take the exam again.  

Based on what John wrote, it sounds like they could very well set up an exam with a due date of Monday at 10pm and an until date of Tuesday @10pm.  Then at 10pm on Monday they go in and add the 1 extra attempt for everystudent who needs to retake the quiz.  Canvas rounds up the late time, so a policy of 20% for 1 day means an exam submitted at 10:10pm on Monday night would be counted as 1 day late and therefore incur the 20% penalty.

The instructors could try this out in a sandbox by putting a couple of instructors in to it as students and setting up a quiz with times where they could check it out to see if it works to their liking.

[gnoack]

Hi @Ron_Bowman 

I think the issue is that, as I read @JohnKern 's original post, he doesn't want a 20% penalty, he wants to allow only a maximum score of 80% on the second attempt.  So if, on the second attempt a student scored 85%, they would get an 80%.  Deducting 20% for being late regardless of the student's score doesn't do that, it simply deducts 20%. 

I don't see a way to do this using the late policy. 

[Ron_Bowman]

@gnoack 

You are correct.  I did not think the issue through correctly.  He wants the minimum of 80% vs the test score.  That can be done via export, excel and import, but I know he does not necessarily want to do that.

[mrslarrimore]

I was hoping to find this same answer-For now, I just look at the "moderate grade" tab to see if they have retaken the test. Then I lower their score to 80 if their score is over that. I also have in my policy the maximum grades for retakes so there is no question as to why their grade was lowered. It takes time with over 200 students, but it's the best workaround I have found until this becomes an option.