Allow Quizzes to not Count Towards Final Grade

In Assignments, there is a check box that allows assignments to be exempted from grades. I would like to see that option available to quizzes as well. I know there are practices quizzes, but then there is not as much functionality and the quiz can not be opened in speedgrader.

18 Comments
kmeeusen
Community Champion

Hi  @glee 

I searched the Canvas Feature Ideas forum and it seems that no one has suggested this particular idea before. However, the feature ideas process is currently in a holding stage. For more information, please refer to Changes Coming to Canvas Community Feature Ideas. Once the new process is unveiled, the Community Team will evaluate your submission and decide whether to move it forward for the next voting period.

I would like to add that individual student responses to practice quizzes can be reviewed by faculty, which might help in the interim.

  • Open the Practice Quiz,
  • Click the drop-down arrow next to the settings gear, and
  • Select "Show Student Quiz Responses", then
  • Select a student submission to view.

I hope this helps,

KLM

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

 @glee , thank you for your idea! It will open for voting on March 1, 2017 as part of the relaunch of feature idea voting. Find out more about the changes we made in Changes are here: New feature idea processes went live Friday! (2/24/17)

christina_biful
Community Novice

This would be particularly helpful for instructors using MasteryPaths. The initial trigger assignment should be a formative assessment, but it cannot be configured as a practice quiz if you want to use it in MasteryPaths. You can of course create a dummy assignment group that is worth 0% of the grade as a workaround, but you also tend to have to remind students frequently that it does not count toward their grade. Giving a "Do not count this assignment toward the final grade" checkbox on quizzes would solve this problem. 

kas200
Community Participant

This would also be great for testing purposes! We had a faculty member who was using an integration and wanted to give her students a "practice" quiz to test it out (not a Canvas "practice quiz", but a quiz to test the integration). Since Canvas's practice quizzes are limited in their analytics, she had to create a graded quiz which ended up impacting the final grade. As a workaround, we set each question value to "0" points, but it would be much easier if there was a checkbox to not include the grade toward the final grade.

QC99_tsilvius
Community Champion

One  extra feature I'm using that is working out sofarsogood‌ (just created a new hashtag there) is leveraging Assignment Group weighting. So my tests and quizzes, etc are dropped in my assignment group named "evidence" and they're weighted as 90% of the grade at my teaching level as per school district grading policy. My homework assignments and quizzes are dropped into my "homework" assignment group and are weighted as the balance of the grade, 10%. Everything else I create for the kids to complete I drop into practice submissions or extra credit groups, but the main point there is that they are weigthed at 0% of the final grade. So even with full grading turned on for 20point quizzes, for example, that 20 points will not get factored into the grade for the term. It's an extra step to turn on weighting, but it's an additional safeguard I do for some peace of mind. 

groups

gharbor
Community Participant

This would make a lot of sense from a Student Grade Report perspective because at the moment all task that don't count towards the final grade have a little "exclamation mark" in the student grade page - EXCEPT for Quizzes. If you are just doing a little class quiz it looks like a summative grade in the Student Grade page. See below example:

Quiz with no Grade Page Help

ryan_corris
Community Contributor

 @christina_biful  I was looking through the Community because of Mastery Paths.  I had the same thoughts as you.  Being a pre-assessment, this should not be graded and count towards a final course grade.  In our case, we tell our teachers to not set percentages in Canvas.  Canvas grades are passed back to our SIS system where the grade categories can be set to percentages of the course.  In this case, the quiz could not be set to sync to SIS, but could still be confusing for the students and parents.

jriley
Community Explorer

This seems like obvious functionality to add if only for consistency. Also, and probably more importantly, instructors who want to do their own grade calculation depend on it. It's a stumbling block to have one type of assignment lacking this capability.

kimberly_smith1
Community Participant

Yes, please add this feature! I am thinking that it might actually be a way for those of us wanting to use quizzes for extra credit to do so without all of the crazy workarounds. 

Kelvin_Dean
Community Contributor

If you're using New Quizzes, you can just check the Do not count this assignment towards the final grade box when editing from Assignments.