[Account Settings] Default Grading Schemes at the Account Level

[kgeary]

This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta •  How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2025-01-18) 

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Because schools often have a school-wide grading scheme that might differ from the default in Canvas, it would be much more efficient if, at the account level, administrators could set the default grading scheme.  Currently, we can create a grading scheme that is available to teachers.  But, if every teacher has to manually go into settings to switch to that grading scheme, it is pretty inefficient.

[asatkins]

Oh, yes, this would be great for us too. Our K12 school uses a 7 point scale, so if anyone forgets to change the default grading scale the SIS will skim off the +/- in the import and just report it as the (in many cases wrong) letter grade, so it's a big deal for us to go set every master course to have the correct grading scale. I think our College of Medicine would appreciate this as well, they use all sorts of weird grades.

[James]

kgeary​,  @asatkins ​:

While you wait on this feature, or for someone else to come along and say "Oh, you just do this ...", here's something you can do.

You can use the Courses: Update a Course API endpoint to set a grading scheme.

     PUT /api/v1/courses/:id

The :id is the Canvas Course id, which can be obtained in many ways including: from the course URL within the page, from the List active courses in an account API method, or from within the web interface from going to Courses >> Managed Accounts >> Settings >> Reports >> Provisioning. In many places, it's possible to use the SIS course ID, but those are usually labeled :course_id and this is just :id, so I'm not sure it will work here. It could be a failure of the documentation or it could be that it's not.

When you use the PUT method, you only need to specify the changes, and in this case, it's the course[grading_standard_id] that you need to identify. It takes an integer value, which is the grading standard to use.

The problem is that the grading standard id isn't easily obtainable from the web interface as everything dealing with grading standards is done through Javascript and the ID doesn't show up. The Grading Standards API allows you to create a standard, but not list the ones that are in use. What I ended up doing was viewing the source of the page that allows you to edit a grading standard. It came up as a single line of Javascript as a JSON object. I copy/pasted it into an online json decoder to clean it up and make it readable. It's an array of grading schemes and you're looking for the value of id for the one you want.

You then loop through every course that you want to force have that grading standard, calling the PUT method, with the course[grading_standard_id] specified.

It sounds daunting, especially if you've never used API calls before. If you have used API calls, this is one of the easier ones to do. If you (or someone at your school) has the technical know-how, it's definitely easier than going into each course one at a time and manually changing it.

[asatkins]

We ran into the hard - to - find object ID with the grading standard issue when we were looking into this, but that makes a lot of sense. That's a good workaround for now, thanks James!

[James]

 @asatkins ​,

I was just looking at the Grading Standards API controller source code for another issue and saw that there is soon going to be a List Grading Standards API call available. The update just got put into the code July 30, although here's the information about it from July 23: Add ability to get grading standards via api

That will definitely simplify finding those grading standard id's and I'm excited to see it going in.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea is now open for voting.

[James]

Just a note that the List Grading Standards API endpoint is now available (yay!)

Depending on your application, though, you may need to be careful using it. It will list either those available at the account level or those available at a course level, depending on which method you call.

"Not a problem," you say, I know where the grading standard resides because I created it In this particular application, that's correct, so no worries.

However, the reverse direction is not straight forward. Let's say you are getting course information through the API and wondering what the actual grading standard is that is being used (not just the id number). If you want to obtain the grading standard, you may need to make two calls --- one to the course and one to the account --- before you get the actual grading standard.

[jbriggs]

Additionally, it would be ideal if not only the grading scheme cascaded to courses from the account but it also cascaded down to letter graded assignments within the course. Glad to see that it is at least in the API now. This has been a sore spot for us since we implemented 3+ years ago.

[mdelaney]

Agreed on the letter graded assignments.  Because of the extra steps most of our teachers stay away from using that option because it has the potential to skew because they are valued on a different scale.

[swright]

I would like to apply a default custom grading scheme to a whole course, instead of choosing it each time I make an assignment, with out losing the current feature of being able to give a specific assignment.

[Renee_Carney]

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