display grade as percentage

[asmith20]

Hello.

I am a high school teacher and pretty new to Canvas. I need to display my grades as a percentage score ( 100 point scale ) instead of points out of, for example, 25. I have a bunch of grades to record on another system this weekend and don't want to have to go through and calculate each grade for each student. I would appreciate any help. Thank you.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello  @asmith20 ​...

After doing a bit of searching here in the Canvas Community, I found a similar question that hopefully will help answer your question.  Please refer to grade book.  Do you think  @Robbie_Grant ​'s answer is what you're looking for?  Please let us know...thanks!!!

[asmith20]

Thanks Chris Hofer.

That seems helpful. "Display Grade As" seems to be what I am looking for; however, I am unable to find that option when I go to edit quizzes that I have administered. I was only able to find it when I tried to edit a new assignment. I would appreciate any additional help with this. Thank you.

Regards.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

 @asmith20 ​...

Right.  Quizzes are adding up all the points you assign to each question and using that score as the "total" for the quiz.  To my knowledge, there isn't an option in Quizzes that lets you "Display Grade As" because of that.

[asmith20]

Thanks Chris.

I think I may try to export the grades as a spreadsheet and run a divide operation on each column that I need. I am not sure how to do that divide operation on a column, yet. Please let me know if you know how to help with that.

Regard.

[Chris_Hofer]

 @asmith20 ​...

stefaniesanders​ gave me a couple links for you to look over:

She also tole me that you could "employ a kludge-y workaround to make the total points worth 100 to make it mimic a percentage".

Hope this helps,

[Stef_retired]

smithap92, I did indeed tell  @Chris_Hofer  that there is "a kludge-y workaround to make the total points worth 100." Essentially, it amounts to manipulating the points possible for each question so that the total points for the quiz equals 100, making the grade mimic a percentage (and also making percentage calculation just a matter of eyeballing the scores). The problem with this is that you need to implement that workaround before any students take the quiz. From the context, I'm inferring that that's not an option for you any longer.

[don_bryn]

Andrew Smith, I've had this same question since our college converted to Canvas.  See this feature request for the most recent one: 

I still can't believe that we can't set our courses to grade all by percentages and then average those percentages together instead of adding all points and dividing for the entire semester.  I think it's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But for now the teachers (Those who have realized Canvas doesn't average the way they expect) are using the method described by Chris Hofer:  Make everything--assignments and quizzes--worth 100 points.   I have a google doc spreadsheet that I use to manually convert every assignment or quiz into percentage that I can then enter into Canvas.   It's kludgy and requires extra steps, but it's the only way to accomplish this for now.

[julaine_rosner]

I hate this answer.  It's unrealistic to have each assignment have the same amount of points.  Canvas should fix this.  Excel will calculate based on the displayed percentage.

[rhelmstu]

To me, this is one of the lamest things about Canvas.  Scaling is an incredibly simple thing for a piece of software to implement:  it's just division.  Instead, people have to invent these elaborate workarounds. 

For this reason, I make sure to hide the students' grade calculation from their view.  Otherwise, they are left with a false impression on their grade.  Before I started hiding the final grade calculations I had to remind my students "Please ignore the current grade you see in Canvas because it doesn't know how to treat assignments worth a differing number of points."  But now that I have to hide their grade, they are forever asking how they're doing (which they have every right to know).  Silly. 

[AngelaGuercio]

For Quizzes open the grade book and go to the top of the quiz you want to show in percentage. Toggle the 3 vertical dots on the top right corner to open the drop-down menu, choose "Enter grade as " and pick percentage. The grade of the quiz that was already calculated in points by Canvas, is now displayed in percentage. Personally, I would not have called it "Enter grade as " since, for a quiz, the grade is auto-calculated. However, since it is possible to modify the grade of a quiz, this option lets also enter the new grade either in points or in percentages.