Allow admins to control when grades lock in concluded grading periods

[brueckert]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote Wed. August 5, 2015 - Wed. November 4, 2015  Learn more about voting...

We would like to use the Term Gradebook feature recently added to Canvas. It would allow us to stay in a single course for the entire school year, allowing us to keep learning mastery data in tact, while still giving us the ability to report grades at the end of each term. In its current form, faculty are locked out of editing grades when the grading period ends. This is problematic for our institution. We live on a trimester schedule where a term might end on a Friday, and the next trimester would start on a Monday or Tuesday. Our faculty are grading exams and papers for at least a week into the next Trimester, sometimes longer. Faculty need access to grades from a prior period, even if that period is concluded.

My feature request/idea is this: separate locking down of grades from the end of the grading period and put it in control of the admins. Admins can either set a separate "lock down date," flip a switch manually, or not lock down grades at all. This would greatly improve this feature for institutions like ours, who want flexibility, as well as those who need secure grades passed to their SIS.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-10-08)

[lane_worrall]

Yes.  After speaking with Deactivated user​  the project manager for Multiple grading periods, our CSM  @ckelson ​ shared that if a teacher creates their own grading periods at the course level, then they will have rights to edit previous grading periods. 

So, this would at least allow your teachers to use the feature.  However, making sure that everyone has created the same grading periods becomes the tricky element here, which is why I was trying to find a way to import from one course to another.  I could have sworn that I read a post in the Community a couple of days ago about importing a grading scheme from one course to another, so I thought it might also work for the grading periods since you access them via the grading scheme option in course settings.  I can't find that post anywhere now, so maybe I was mistaken about the import functionality. 

[cbarham]

It was very frustrating indeed! We did read the notes and shared them but not all read closely. Most of our teachers have disabled multiple grading periods because of this issue.

[clong]

Just wanted to share how we handle grading terms and offer a word of caution.

Disclaimer: we are a High School only District so maybe we are a typical.

We send out quarterly report cards but the only grades that matter (are official) are the semester grades. So we have a practice of making a course for 1st and a new one for 2nd semester. We use the Canvas API to pull our grades into an interface where teachers can verify them and then transfer them to our SIS for the report cards and this is working very well for us.

One advantage of doing this is that some Canvas courses get really big with lots of assignments, modules and more and if you have one course that is the same all year long you could get to the point where it becomes unwieldy and there is just so much stuff you have to scroll through. There's also a limit to the amount of assignments you will see when trying to add them to a Module and once you go over (I think 60) it gets tricky.

So we haven't had much use for the Multiple Marking periods and all our teachers are able to get into their courses after the term ends in order to finish up their grading.  In the admin term settings we usually let teachers access the course for 2 weeks after the term end date and this gives them the time they need to close out the grading process in that course while at the same time they can access their new course and use that immediately.

Another thing to consider is gradebook performance. I know this is being worked on, but when you have a lot for assignments and entries in your gradebook things get ugly. Get ready for a ton of scrolling and some slow load times for a fairly active one year course. Your heavy Canvas users may get to the point where they want to use something else because of the hassles. I see it just in semester long courses.

[shannon_larrea]

We also have this issue.  I would like to see a lock out date separate from the end date.  I extend the deadline to the grades due date so assignments get added to previous quarter until grades due, then I switch the start and end dates.  This readjusts the assignments into the next quarter.  At this point, grades can be entered into SIS.  I may try course level access in future if it's not fixed through Canvas.

[brueckert]

Chris, it sounds like we have a somewhat similar setup at our school, a K12 private institution (Canvas only for grades 5-12). We are on a Trimester schedule and official grades are reported a week after the completion of each term. We also have separate courses for each term, but our faculty are more and more interested in tracking standards and mastery data for year-long courses across the entire school year. Multiple grading periods would make this possible.

Gradebook and general performance is a concern for us. If we would move to multiple grading periods, I would try to head off these concerns by prepping my faculty with training in modules - rolling publishing/unpublishing, sequenced by unit/topic or even cycle (we use a six day cycle) - to keep kids away from the assignments page, which would get a little unwieldy. I hope that improvements are made to the gradebook in the coming months as this is something that is a legitimate issue for assignment-heavy courses already.

[joseph_allen]

The ability to over lap a grading period would be good as well.  So that some classes can run on quarters, while others run on semesters.

[nlatimer]

Okay, so here is an interesting thing I just learned from a teacher at my school. This teacher never goes to the gradebook to change grades; he always uses SpeedGrader directly from the assignment page. He sent me a screencast showing me how he was able to go to an assignment that is from our first marking period, which is now over. The grade cannot be changed from the gradebook, as expected. If you click on the assignment and modify the grade from the SpeedGrader, Canvas will change the grade accordingly in the gradebook.

[brueckert]

Hi nlatimer

We were able to find this workaround as well, but determined after discussions with Instructure that this was actually a loophole that would likely be plugged up in the future as this completely negates the purpose of locking down grades in the first place. I wouldn't count on using this workaround moving forward.

[nlatimer]

Yes,  @brueckert ​, somehow that doesn't surprise me. Good to know - thank you!

[joseph_allen]

My school district would need to turn off grading periods if there was a complete lock down of grades.  In K12, the lock just doesn't make sense as there are always teachers that need to go back and make adjustments for one reason or another.  FYI - I tried to upload CSV grades and that didn't work either.  Canvas needs to fix this now.  Make it operate more like 'terms' where admins have the option to lock it at some point after the grading period, or not lock it at all.