[Assignments] Assignments within weighted groups treated with equal value regardless of points

[lse224]

Please excuse the verbose title.

Our faculty want the option to have assignments within an assignment group to be given the same weight even if they are graded on different point values.

For example:

Assignment Group = Homework  25% of final grade

Homework 1 10 pts

Homework 2 15 pts

Homework 3 10 pts

etc.

Currently, the homework #2 which is worth 15 points will have a larger influence over the grade than homeworks 1 or 3. We can encourage faculty to grade all assignments within a group on the same point-value scale, but there are 3,000 of them and four of us. Additionally, our previous LMS, Blackboard, allowed the user to opt to weigh all of the assignments WITHIN a group equally. Faculty are very upset by this lack in functionality ESPECIALLY when they become aware of the miscalculation right before final grades are due.

Thanks,

-Lea

[bgallo]

How is this not a feature over a year later? This should take no longer than a couple of hours of a good developer's time.

[don_bryn]

Finally on the radar!  Oh wait. . . it's been on the radar since October 2016??!!

Since I've been part of this community I have seen this request come up so many times. . . but for some reason never got the attention of enough people at the right time.

I consider this a bug in Canvas that grades are not weighted equally.  I admittedly do not know anything about the history of Canvas development, but this appears to me to be a leftover from beginnings as a corporate education tool. . . is that possible?   What I mean is that the only place I've ever seen unequally weighted grading is in corporate environment.   In the academic world I know of now one who has ever had this as a teacher or a student ( @kona ) is literally the only person who has ever replied to me that they use the unequally-weighted system.  And I've asked a lot of teachers and students. . .  This would be a good poll for Canvas to send out to all community members.

At the very least we should have a setting available to instructors or admins.   AND there should be a BIG warning to all teachers that this is how Canvas works.  The first semester with canvas we were about 1/3 of the way through the semester before any instructors realized this bug existed and we all rushed to change all assignments to be worth 100 points.  I worry that instructors or entire institutions could go a year or two before noticing this bug and then have to figure out how to regrade students who have graduated!

I think the reason teachers see this as a "miscalculation" is that most academic instructors would never expect anything besides equally weighted assignments, so it is quite a surprise to learn that Canvas isn't even CAPABLE of doing so.

[don_bryn]

DITTO!  We all have to use spreadsheets and virtually calculate out own grades.

[don_bryn]

I'm a programmer as well and have been trying to figure out how creating an alternate math equation could be so difficult to program for a computerized system. . .  Computers excel at math!

[kona]

 @don_bryn ‌, am I understanding you correctly that I'm the only person you know of that is using and ok with the unequal weighting of assignments within an assignment group? If so, then I could also introduce you to about half of the faculty at my College who also don't want every assignment in an assignment group to be equally weighted. Actaully in all my years as a student (way way too many) I don't remember any Instructor who weighted grades also having the assignments within the groups equally weighted. I'd also guess that because there are only 195 votes for this, some feature ideas have gotten a lot more in a much shorter time span, that the majority of Canvas users aren't that bothered by this. 

In my mind if I wanted everything equal then I'd just make them worth the same number of points. Maybe it becauss I'm a math oriented person, but the way Canvas does it is the way weighted groups normally function. Yes, you could make the assignments within a group be the same, but I like that in my Project 1 Assignemnt group (worth 10% of the course grade) the topic proposal doesn't get the same weight as the final project paper. To me that makes a lot of sense. 

Yet, I do understand why some people might want this feature and I'm not opposed to it as an option and have even up voted this Feature Idea (prior to this conversation). 

Side note, no, Canvas was 100% not developed out of or for corporate education. It was designed and built by two College kids who wanted to make an LMS that didn't suck. They used their own experiences with the LMS and asked other students and people in higher education what they thought, and then built Canvas up from there. 

The Other Brian Whitmer: The Story of Instructure 

BYU grads introduce education-savvy software | Deseret News 

[sean_flaherty]

Howdy, Don.

I would very much like to see Canvas develop a feature that would clearly and easily allow for instructors to use custom weighting (equal or unequal depending on the wants/needs of the instructor) on a per assignment basis.

There are times where I want assignments to be valued the same in the grading calculation even though they may not have the exact same number of problems/tasks/points when I initially grade them.  For those assignments, I do get frustrated that I have to use Excel to perform a pretty simple calculation in order to get that equal weighting.  If I can do this simply in Excel, why can't Canvas?

For many other assignments, I want to Canvas to allow me to easily scale the weighting of assignments.  To use  @kona 's example, it would be nice if I could easily have Canvas have the project proposal worth 10 points while the final project paper be worth 100 points (or something to that effect) without having to manually calculate the grades behind the scenes in Excel.

This is why I've been pitching the "out of" vs "worth" feature to be developed in Canvas because an instructor could easily communicate to Canvas how they would like an assignment to be treated within the grading calculation in Canvas.  If you want everything treated equally, set all "worth" values to be the same.  If I want to scale up/down the value of the assignment within the grading calculation, I can easily set the "worth" values to be whatever multiples of each other to suit my needs.

This feature already exists in several other grading platforms.  I'm not a programmer so I don't know how difficult it would be to implement but I do know the math well enough because I'm having to program that calculation into Excel several times a semester to do what Canvas won't.

Sean

[jbrennan2]

I've been piloting Canvas this semester, and I have to say, this one thing is a serious issue to me.  I'm pretty sure this would not be that complicated of a fix for Canvas to do, but for some reason, despite hundreds of users requesting it, it hasn't happened.

My university is asking whether I would like to adopt Canvas, and to be 100% honest, I am tempted to say no because not having this feature makes the gradebook almost unusable for me.  I am forced to keep a separate Excel sheet to do what I want to do.  I understand it's possible to force all my assignments to be out of 100 points, but I would rather not do that, as then some problems are going to be worth fractional points if I want to weight all problems equally.   If Canvas included this feature, I would probably be willing to use their gradebook for absolutely everything and I could finally forego having a separate Excel file. 

Why can't Canvas just do this already?

[don_bryn]

HI,  @jbrennan2 , 

At our college, we were about six weeks into the first semester using Canvas before someone noticed the grades were not being calculated correctly (as expected and required according to syllabi).  This person notified our department and we all scrambled to recalculate grades up to that point to make all assignments were 100 points.  However, someone pointed out that there were probably still a couple hundred instructors across our campus who did not realize this flaw (We DID notify our online learning department).

If you decide to adopt Canvas, just make sure you communicate this clearly to all instructors.  I'm afraid institutions who use Canvas are setting themselves up for some major issues in the future if any of their instructors do not use an external spreadsheet to calculate grades.  We are a few years in to our Canvas use now and if one student in one class with one instructor who does not understand the way Canvas calculates gets an incorrect grade, it could easily turn in to an episode of every faculty member having to manually regrade every student in every course going back to the beginning of Canvas use.   And if the news gets hold of the story. . .   It could easily turn into a bigger issue than anyone wants.

In my opinion, this is serious enough that it should have been fixed by Canvas developers the minute it was brought up, even if it didn't gather enough votes.  I'm with you all the way.

As Kona said, it can be an option, but it has to be clear and should be able to be set at the admin level so teachers can't mess it up if an institution chooses.  And it should happen yesterday!  Canvas is a computer-based system, let it do what it does best:  Numbers!

[jnydegger]

I am new to Canvas but find it highly disturbing that this function was not included originally in the software and almost 3 years after it was brought to their attention they still have not included it.  Should I assume this attitude is par for the course for this company?

[kriles]

I try to minimize my dependence on Canvas grades. In my last course I used it only for bookkeeping of individual assignment scores so that my students could see those scores . I exported the scores to a spreadsheet to calculate actual course grades at the end of the semester.

It remains perplexing that this large corporation can't implement such a straightforward feature. We even had a teleconference a couple of years ago among our IT folks, several instructors like myself and representatives of the software company, where we pleaded for this feature to be implemented. You can draw your own conclusions about a company that can't manage to get this done on that time scale. It's remarkable.