Allow 'Treat ungraded as 0' in New Gradebook

[jeremy_stevens]

It would be very useful to be able to use the 'Treat ungraded as 0' feature of the current Gradebook in the New Gradebook, especially once the New Gradebook becomes the default in January 2020. I understand that not having this option seems to be by design, however there are use cases relevant to our tertiary institution that I would like to outline to see if they gather support among the Canvas Community. Please feel free to add your own use cases in the comments if this is relevant to you as well.

Our teaching staff use the Total column in the Gradebook to view how well a student is doing overall in their unit attempt. Not having the 'Treat ungraded as 0' feature in the future will mean that:

1. At the start of a teaching period – if say, 2/5 assignments have been completed by students and graded – the Total column will display a grade that is the scaled-up version of where they are sitting, working on the assumption that the other assignments are to be ignored. It would be possible for someone to achieve 100% in both completed assessments, and the Total column would then display a score of 100%. This is not an accurate reflection of where the student is at in terms of their overall completion of the unit and means the instructor has to do manual work, or ensure they set up assignment groups in particular ways, to try and figure out an accurate representation of student progress.

2. At the end of a teaching period – once all assignments have been completed by students and graded – the Total column will display a scaled-up grade for any students who have not completed any assignments or are missing grades. For these students, in reality, their non-submission is equivalent to a score of 0 – however in the New Gradebook, the Total column will not reflect this. This makes it difficult for instructors to review their cohort's progress and standing once the teaching period is complete, before those grades are to be formally sent to the SIS for release.

The only suggestion I've seen so far to mitigate against these issues is to use a Missing Submission policy.

How do I apply a Missing Submission policy in the New Gradebook?‌

This is not an adequate solution in our case.

In the case of example 1 above: at early stages of semester, students won't actually have 'missing' submissions – those submissions will be due in the future. A Missing Submissions policy would not apply.

In the case of example 2 above: Missing Submission policies do not apply to No Submission or On Paper assignments, LTI assignments, or assignments that do not have due dates set. We also cannot force Missing Submission policies at the account level, or via API when each individual Canvas course is created, to ensure consistency across our institution for such a crucial display issue. This would mean that even if it were an acceptable solution in other regards (and as per example 1, it isn't quite there in this case), we would be asking all of our institution's instructors to apply the same Missing Submission policy, and ensure that the exceptions to the policy as above also had 0 grades implemented where students had not submitted work. Not only is there scope for error here across large institutions such as ours, but this seems a disproportionate amount of effort to ask instructors to go to simply so that they can see an accurate reflection of their student's total grades for the overall unit.

This is a crucial issue for us, as we need instructors to be able to see how their students are doing throughout, and at the end of semester – this information informs moderation, future assessment design, learning outcomes, and reporting to faculty.

Others have suggested that the Missing Submission policy feature be amended (https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/13954-apply-missing-submission-policy-to-all-assignment-types?...‌), and while I agree that it could use further flexibility, in our above case it would not quite solve our problems. It would be a simpler solution to allow the new Gradebook to set 'Treat ungraded as 0' to on or off instead. I understand that the Gradebook CSV Export is still calculating the Unposted Final Grade anyway – so the 'Treat ungraded as 0' score is still there in the system, just not being displayed at the UI level.

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2021-02-20) - Canvas Community 

[gulick_24]

Unfortunately, this re-release of the feature (for which I’m glad, don’t get me wrong…) doesn’t solve the actual issue --> that students need to be able to see their final grade in the course if they do nothing else in the course. Many students think they can skip the final exam because their current final grade is an A, but without doing the exam, it falls to a C. Then they're surprised they got a C... "but I had an A!" etc. Can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation with students. (As an academic advisor, I'm the one the students come to to complain about this for quite a number of courses.)  So STUDENTS need access to a “treat ungraded as zero” sort of option, not just instructors.

@Stef_retired- Anything like this in the works for students?

[Stef_retired]

@gulick_24 

My quick search through Idea Conversations doesn't immediately surface a request for this from the student side, and I'm not aware that anything like this is in the works, possibly because students can enable the "Calculate based only on graded assignments" check mark on their Grades tab, as depicted in How do I approximate my assignment scores using th... - Canvas Community.

When I was teaching large courses, I entered zero grades after an assignment's due date passed (using either Speedgrader or the default grade option in the Gradebook) for any ungraded and not-submitted assignments, and frequently reminded students how to use the "What if" functionality described in the above-referenced documentation—and because of that, I can safely say that I didn't ever get last-minute complaints about grade surprises. Students were able to see at any point in the semester what their cumulative grade was, and could use "what if" to hypothesize how they could improve or maintain that grade.

If you find a link to an idea conversation that asks for an enhancement to this functionality on the student side, would you post it here? Thanks.

[Stef_retired]

@gulick_24 I did find this very old one, but it is in a critical way counter to the view-only messaging that is being implemented: Treat zeros as ungraded for both teacher and stude... - Canvas Community 

[Stef_retired]

Hi everyone, as noted in the updated Canvas Release Notes, implementation of this functionality has been delayed to January 16, 2021.

[careysmith]

Scoring as zero past-due assignments is essential for my class. 

I use McGraw-Hill "Connect". Since assignments are done in Connect, the Canvas version of the assignments do not have a submission. 

This semester, some students had many missing assignments, but Canvas just puts in dashes, not zeros, so they don't affect the overall grade shown in Canvas. I didn't realize this till I export the grades * found %% to 10% lower "final" grades than "current" grades. So these students & I thought they had C's, but actually had D's ! This is not fair to the students.

Also, both versions of the overall score should be shown: Current and Final.

Or, as MyOpenMath does, show overall scores for assignments graded and assignments past due, which counts missing assignments as zeros.

[colleen]

I am so happy that this is about to be introduced to Canvas, finally.

But we need to be able to make this a Global Setting. We want all students, TAs and Assessors to be seeing " Treat ungraded as 0" as the default. Doesn't matter how many times we ask everyone to select this, they don't, and therefore have an incorrect reading of their completion. Our students have to get 100% to show competency but with the current set up, they can't quickly tell if a) they haven't completed everything or b) they need to go back and redo a few questions. If we had this as the Global setting, there would be now misunderstandings. They just see 100% and think they are all good.

Please can we have this as a Global Setting

@Stefanie Do I need to put a new idea in for this or is it automatically tagged in to the current idea/implementation?

[Stef_retired]

@colleen A request to make this a global setting would need to be submitted as a new idea conversation.

[Jeff_F]

Hello - In case anyone in interested, there is related commentary on the 02-20-2021 release notes.

To summarize, from what I can ascertain there are approximately 75 negative comments and perhaps two positive comments pertaining to this feature. Most of the negative comments seem to be concerned with instructor misuse of the tool as the setting to Treat Ungraded as Zero is persistent.  But there are additional reasons.  

Is anyone who promotes this new feature advocating for this setting to be persistent?  Please explain why that is useful.  I ask as in my view when an instructor navigates away from the gradebook, that setting should be removed.  This is especially of concern as no notice is given should they next access the gradebook a day or week later.   The text on the total columns is hardly noticeable.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Releases/Canvas-Release-Notes-2021-02-20/ta-p/434781 

[Stef_retired]

Comments from Instructure

The Gradebook View menu includes the View Ungraded as 0 option, which is a visual change only and does not affect any grades. This change aligns parity with the Individual View Gradebook and provides instructors with a visual change in identifying grading calculations for ungraded assignments.

This feature can be enabled in Canvas through a feature option in Account Settings.

For more information please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2021-02-20)