Allow instructors/admins to delete student assignment submissions

[MWilliams24]

I'd like to propose that admins, and possibly also instructors, are given the ability to delete a student's assignment submission (not just the file - the submission itself). At minimum, a record should be kept of who deleted the submission and when (for auditing purposes) - perhaps in the form of a log in the 'Gradebook history'.

This suggestion has been raised numerous times as Idea Conversations since 2011, and has collectively received hundreds of comments and five-star ratings from the community.

Below is a list of scenarios (probably non-exhaustive) in which the current inability to delete student assignment submissions causes problems.

Scenario: Student inadvertently submits their assignment prematurely/incomplete (but to the correct portal)

• If the assignment was set to single submission only, the instructor now needs to:
  • set the assignment to two submissions for ALL students, and to avoid giving other students a second submission, the instructor needs to organise a time to make the assignment available to only this particular student, then needs to change the assignment back to single submission and make it available to all students again.
• The instructor is forced to live with the clutter and annoyance of having an assignment submission which does not belong there.

Scenario: Student inadvertently submits to the wrong assignment portal

• All points above, plus
• The instructor can no longer unpublish the assignment portal because it contains submissions.
• The instructor can no longer convert the assignment a group assignment because it contains submissions.
• The instructor is now consistently prompted (via the Dashboard to do list) to grade a submission which does not need to be graded.

Scenario: Student inadvertently submits to a past assignment portal which has already been graded

• All points above, plus
• The Gradebook icon now suggests that the student has not been graded because their most recent submission is not graded. To get around this, the instructor needs to click ‘Use this same grade for the resubmission’ – essentially grading a submission for a completely different assignment using the grading rubric/rules for this assignment.

Add on to this the extra workload for instructors (and us admin staff) when they contact us to ask how to delete a submission, only for us to have to tell them that it is impossible in what is supposed to be a modern LMS. Even the archaic Blackboard Learn allowed submissions to be deleted.

I do see value in the core philosophy that is “keep a record of anything and everything”, but when it results in headaches and workload for countless instructors, students and admin staff, a line must be drawn. It would not be a monumental task to allow deletion of submissions while keeping a record of who deleted the submission and when (for auditing purposes).

If there are concerns about instructors inadvertently/recklessly deleting submissions they shouldn’t be, then this can be made available to admins only, or a toggleable user permission. Alternatively, this can be made “difficult” for the average user (e.g. only make it possible through the API).

This has been requested on the Canvas Community since 2011. This idea has had hundreds of comments and five-star ratings across multiple idea threads over the course of more than a DECADE. In 2015, Instructure posted an update stating:
It's a great feature idea and we would like to solve this problem. However, our immediate roadmap is overflowing with other great ideas and we will not realistically get to this feature request in the immediate future. I'm going to have to Archive this for now, but don't lose hope. This is a really solid feature request and one that deserves our attention. It won't evaporate from our minds just because it's archived right now.

[SusanNiemeyer]

To me, the Instructor of the course should have the ability to delete a student submission for all of the reasons that @MWilliams24  have listed.

Adding to this, I would not give the student the opportunity to do this because, in some circumstances, the instructor may wish to “keep a record of anything and everything.”

However, if the Instructor wishes to delete a submission, then he or she should have the ability to do so. That would give authority and control back to the Instructor.

I've been using Assignments Enhancements for a year now, and I'd like to see this feature idea incorporated into it. 

[chriscas]

This one is very difficult for me, as a Canvas admin, to figure out whether to support or not...

My first thought is that students probably should not have this functionality.  Instructors are a bit more of a gray area, since they have some authority in the course, but it also would involve removing things that they don't really own.  Removing a submitted file is now available to admins, but there are times that I even question whether or not that is a good idea.  I think most fears around this idea are around someone misusing their abilities and effectively harming a student (whether it's a teacher or an admin).

If Instructure ever decides to go down this route, I'd have a few comments.ideas.  First, it should be a permission that admins can give to account and course roles as their own choosing (we don't like Instructure making choices like this for us).  Second, I'd propose some kind of "soft" delete, where everything is gone in the UI, but the submission/file data would still be in the database and accessible to admins via API (with a way to restore too, if needed).  We already get a fair amount of "Canvas ate my submission" support requests, which are very hard to troubleshoot.  Trying to figure out if an instructor or admin deleted a submission adds even more complexity.  To be clear, a message saying "submission deleted by ZZZ" would not be acceptable, as we'd like to have all of the details and the submission itself still available.

Even if the above was in place, there would be some other technical issues to figure out.  If a submission is deleted, what if it has been sent to a plagiarism checking service already...  Likely the teacher and student would want the submission removed from the plagiarism databases, but there may not be a mechanism for doing that.  Likewise, external tool assignments may not be set up to handle resubmissions gracefully either.  I'm sure each of these things could be solves, but it feels like this functionality could really be opening a can of worms.

The more I think about it, the more I lean towards the opinion that Instructure needs to "finish" assignment enhancements.  I remember when the "limit number of attempts" feature came out, we were told a moderation feature (like what's in quizzes to allow individual students an extra attempt) would eventually be available.  Seems like that would solve many issues, although I know it would also be work for faculty to enter those exceptions.  I'm more in favor of that to really keep the data integrity of Canvas as it currently stands.

-Chris

[MWilliams24]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for adding to the discussion.

• I agree that students should not have this functionality. I also agree that instructors do not need to have this functionality directly, as it is not a common enough issue such that individual instructors would need to contact us frequently.
• From reading past threads, the ability to remove files came about due to students sometimes uploading offensive or otherwise inappropriate content which does not belong in the LMS (think confidential information, sexual content etc.). For this reason I consider the ability to delete files to be crucial.
• When our institution used the Blackboard Learn LMS, our admin support team would only ever delete submissions if we had the request in writing. That way there's always a paper trail, including a record of which instructor requested the submission be deleted and when.
• A soft delete with the ability to restore the submission would be excellent, if not too difficult to implement.
• Our institution uses Turnitin, which allows us to request that a submission be deleted from their paper repository, so we already have a mechanism for this. More conveniently, Turnitin offers an 'Exclude sources' feature, so that an individual source can be excluded from similarity checking, which would suffice in this scenario. I am not familiar with other plagiarism checkers but assume they would offer similar functionalities. Moreover and perhaps more importantly, in the scenario where a student submits to the wrong assignment portal (whether that be a past or an upcoming assignment), their eventual, actual, submission will be matched with a high similarity regardless of whether the original submission can be deleted in Canvas, so I can't see how this has any impact.
• I would not expect external tool assignments to be included in the scope of this suggestion, partly because they are in the minority of all Canvas assignments and partly because Instructure can only have so much control over how they function.
• A moderation feature would be a good alternative, and if properly implemented I would absolutely support this.

Cheers

Matt

[SusanNiemeyer]

I have much hope that this discussion will be fruitful.

@MWilliams24  and @chriscas  - 

One of the questions you have both discussed is who, if anyone, should be able to delete an assignment. Both of you are posting from the point of a view of a Canvas school administrator. I would like to share some of my thoughts as a tenured community college professor.

At my college, we have a classified staff member who serves as our Canvas administrator. His role is to address technical issues. To involve him in questions related to a student's academic performance would be inappropriate. I don't need, and shouldn't need, the college's Canvas administrator's "approval" to make decisions on how I teach my courses or deal with student-related issues. 

I'm also a former vice chair of the largest department in my college. In that role, I rarely got involved in the day-to-day classroom interactions between my fellow faculty members and their students, and only did so when a student filed a complaint or an instructor requested my assistance. Why should teaching online be any different than in a traditional face-to-face class?

My Canvas courses contain numerous graded assignments. When anyone hears the word "assignment," they often picture summative assignments, such as term papers, which carry a great deal of importance in determining the student's final grade. The reality is that many instructors, including myself, have created dozens and dozens of small, formative assignments.

If a student makes a mistake and submits Monday's homework instead of Tuesday's homework for an assignment, why shouldn't I be able to delete the submission? Are you suggesting that I should have to jump through hoops and get the approval of my college's Canvas administrator, or my department chair, or maybe my dean? Why? Please trust your teachers and your professors to make wise decisions. Don't take our authority and control from us.

And, Canvas already gives instructors the ability to edit and delete graded student work in discussions. If the student posts a reply to Monday's discussion in the Tuesday discussion thread, I can fix it. It's easy to do, and I don't need anyone's approval. Of course, if a student's participation in the discussion is problematic, I would take a screenshot of it as a record. In this case (graded discussions), I already have authority and control.

Because some assignments are, in fact, important summative assignments, the best solution would be the "soft delete." A retrievable copy of the student's original submission with the time stamp (etc.) should be saved.

Finally, I would not give students the ability to edit or delete their assignments once they have been submitted. Because I grade my students' discussions, I have turned off this option for them as well. 

[chriscas]

I hope this can be a fruitful discussion, and one Instructure can eventually read and maybe respond to as well!

In my opinion, a feature like this will need to be heavily customizable (through permissions or other means), as there are going to be wildly varying opinions of how this should work.  Different countries/states, different grade levels (k-5, 6-8, 9-12, higher-ed, etc), and just plain different people could all play a role here.

Usually at my institution, we do try to make policies/procedures between in-person and online as close as possible.  Deleting submissions is interesting because it's a case where (arguably) the LMS can improve the experience for all involved, but similarly can also bring more downsides.  I think perhaps a core question to consider here is what expectations everyone has about the LMS, and how reasonable are those expectations...  A few thoughts below...

• Data (submission) retention: Some administrators (not just Canvas admins, I'm talking more along the lines of leadership/admin positions in general) would like the LMS to have and be a complete record of all activity that happened in a particular course.  For this group, preserving all submissions (and even assignments/quizzes) is important.  On the other hand, some would leave things completely in the hands of the instructor/teacher, like what happens without an LMS (everything is on paper and up to the teacher/instructor to keep track of).  Either of those options could end up working fine, but they are very different approaches, and could have very different outcomes in a case where a student says "I'm sure I turned in Assignment X".  if the LMS kept all data, it would be easier to look back and find out whether or not the student did submit X or not.  With the latter approach, it would be harder to prove or disprove what the student said (which can be problematic in come cases).  This is where my middle ground idea of a "soft-delete" came in, where perhaps the front end can look like things are gone, while they are in fact still kept in the database and accessible via some kind of reporting method if needed.
• Roles/hierarchy of a school/college: This gets very tricky, and hopefully I don't offend anyone here (but apologies in advance just in case I do).  There may be some things where an instructor/teacher would like to do something, but they may not technically have the authority to do so.  Aside from the submissions issue at hand here, an area where this often comes up is course enrollments.  Some instructors/teachers would like to be able to add whoever they want into a Canvas shell (with whatever role they choose).  This does, in many cases, mirror what can happen in-person, as it's unlikely that there is a security guard or system in place checking whether each individual person entering a classroom at any given time is on an official roster.  On the other hand, most schools/universities have a person or department that handles enrollments (especially on the student side of things, for instructors/teachers there is way more variance).  That person/department may say that they have the final authority to decide who can or can not be in a particular course.  Just like deleting submissions, there doesn't seem to be an "ultimate" answer to this question, and Instructure has developed Canvas so that it can handle almost any desired scenario with the permissions and options available.

I think most everyone would love to trust instructors/teachers to do the right thing, but hopefully some of what I said in he bullets above will highlight that i's not just a trust issue at play here.  What I'm really advocating for here is giving a school/university options for how to handle this.  Some may want to give the instructor/teacher complete control over deleting submissions, others may want to give it to Canvas admins, and some may even not want admins to be able to have the ability at all.

On a final note, It is important to me that whatever solution is eventually developed/implemented works universally.  By that, I mean it has to work for internal canvas assignments, external LTI tools, etc.  Even though I think internal Canvas assignments are a vast majority of assignments overall, there are still a large number of external tool assignments overall.  A system that would only work for one or the other would be very confusing and would definitely be more challenging to support overall.

-Chris

[SusanNiemeyer]

@chriscas - Thank you for sharing your observations as a Canvas school administrator. I'm sure that you receive many requests from instructors to restore items that they have mistaken deleted or overwritten. At the end of my first semester teaching on Canvas (Spring 2020), I managed to delete my students' final exams by playing around with my course Calendar. After a few moments of panic, I thankfully came across /undelete. Given that some assignments are high-stakes summative assignments, I can see how even a soft delete feature used by less-experienced instructors could become problematic.

That being said, we (instructors and administrators) alike clearly need better options in managing student submissions. 

---

@MWilliams24 wrote:

This suggestion has been raised numerous times as Idea Conversations since 2011, and has collectively received hundreds of comments and five-star ratings from the community.

One of biggest annoyances I have is that I'm unable to give an individual student an opportunity to resubmit an assignment, just as I am with a quiz. Right now, if I want to open up a submission for a student, I do three separate tasks:

• change the number of submissions for the entire class
• set up a new window of assignment dates
• click on "Resubmit Assignment" in SpeedGrader  (Other than perhaps put the assignment back on the student's To-Do List, this button seems to have very limited functionality.)

There are obvious problems with this set-up:

• It's very easy for an instructor to forget one of these three steps.
• I have to wait until after the assignment closes for the entire class in order to keep other students from resubmitting their assignments. 

Assignments should work like Quizzes. I think we all agree that instructors should be able to open up an additional submission for a single student. Therefore, I would propose adding this functionality to the "Resubmit Assignment" button in SpeedGrader. 

[Hildi_Pardo]

We haven't started using this feature yet, so I am not familiar with what is and isn't possible yet.   But I would prefer to have a Reassign button (like in "classic" assignments).   

[jmerriam]

This has been suggested by instructors going all the way back to 2011...,yet Canvas has yet to implement it. The response from Canvas to this post is that it's a "great feature idea"...so why has it not been implemented in 13 years??????????????

[Jeff_F]

As a Canvas admin, I like that there is no doubt as to the file status. These can never be deleted once submitted. To me, that is logical as we need to maintain records. That said, this was a capability in our prior LMS.

For the nine years I've been using Canvas as an instructor, I've not been in the situation where I absolutely needed to delete a submission. Instead, if an updated file is needed I then ask the student to update the work and to upload it again. This can now be done with Reassign, and / or I can edit the assignment settings to enable multiple attempts.  Or they can post it as an attachment to a comment reply.

But I understand people have preferences. For me, I would opt to disable the feature should I be king that day.  ;o)

[james_trueman]

We have scenarios where either professional NDA's are in place with businesses that students are based in or learning through, or other sensitive data (e.g., patient data - for healthcare students), where an error is made in an upload. So, in terms of data security - we would rather have the ability to fully delete a submission record directly - and are happy to take on the governance of that ourselves. We just need the tool to be able to do it. If there are institutions that 'do not' want the delete option available, it would make sense that it is deployed with a feature flag that can disable it at account level, and it is never dropped into their local instance.

I also agree with @jmerriam - this has been a long discussed / desired feature. The sheer weight of requests suggests that there are enough in the community who need it, that it should be part of the Canvas environment, for those who do want to enable it.