Grade Distribution

[Mysnyk]

As the Canvas administrator at my school, I would like it if there was a way to have the grade distribution for assignments, tests, and quizzes turned off for all courses. I know how to turn them off for individual classes but it would be much more convenient to have a global setting that would allow me to turn it off for all courses.

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Welcome @Mysnyk to the Instructure Community! I looked through my admin settings at the account and subaccount level and could not find where hiding grade distribution graphs can be disabled like it can at the course level. I can imagine how custom CSS and API calls could be used for this purpose but lack the expertise to do so myself. However, our colleagues in the developers group might be able to help, so I moved your question to that group's discussion area. I hope they can help!

[chriscas]

Hi @Mysnyk,

Are you looking to just default these settings to off, or actually restrict teachers from enabling them at all?

Defaulting them of off should be possible (for newly created courses) by applying a course template to your account.  In the template course, you'd turn the settings off, and once that course template is applied to the account, all new courses would basically inherit the setting.  Teachers could still change that setting on their own though.  To affect a change on existing courses, you could use the API to list all of your current courses then go through them programmatically one by one and change the setting.  For someone with Canvas API experience, this is a likely pretty simple task, but if you're brand new to the API (and not a coder by trade/hobby), this might be rather daunting.

If you wanted to attempt to restrict that setting from being changed, it could be possible by hiding the checkbox element with CSS or JavaScript.  For most teachers, that should suffice, but if someone was really determines to change the setting themselves, they may be able to work around the CSS or use the Canvas API to adjust the setting.  Not sure how much of a concern that would be for you.

Let us know if any of this makes sense to you and if you need help with anything that's been mentioned here!

-Chris