[Assignments] Delete submissions by students

[amanda_liana_mc]

Hello!

A situation recently came up in class where we wanted to remove a submission that a student uploaded to an assignment. We were told by support that "the only way to do that is to remove the assignment completely from the course," which isn't the most convenient thing (because then we delete other submissions by other students).

It would be useful to have an option for faculty and TAs to delete submissions for individual students.

Thank you!

[kona]

 @amanda_liana_mc ​, I did a quick search and found these feature ideas that seemed similar to what you were wanting - & . Both of these ideas have been archived, one for a low number of votes and the other got a response from Canvas. You might want to check out these ideas, add your feedback and follow them so you'll be alerted to any updates.

[kroeninm]

 @amanda_liana_mc ​, why would you want to remove a submission when the student can resubmit the assignment?  Just curious.  Maybe incorrect submissions of some kind? 

- Melanie

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. February 3, 2016 - Wed. May 4, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[kmeeusen]

Melanie:

I tend to agree with you on this one, which is perhaps why the previous attempts at this feature failed from low votes.

However, I would like to see more use-case scenarios before I completely make up my face (my mind is shot to heck). There may be scenarios where this could be useful, although I have been teaching in Canvas for almost four years and have not encountered one yet.

KLM

[canvas_admin]

I constantly get students who inadvertently the wrong assignment to the wrong assignment slot.  Yes, the students can upload the correct assignment and so it will show up there with multiple submissions.  The problem is that one of the submissions is completely wrong and does not belong there at all.

Additionally, sometimes I get the feeling students do this "accidentally" to get around pre-requisites that we've set up.  I would love to be able to delete their submission so that the pre-requisite reverted back to not being fulfilled. 

[kmeeusen]

Mark:

Great use-case scenario!

See, this is what I was looking for, and your scenario makes sense to me. I seldom use pre-requisites in my own courses, but if I did I would hate to have them circumvented by a student uploading their shopping list or some such thing.

Thanks Mark!

KLM

[ezaurova]

Personally, I'm nervous about your suggestion.  I've actually come across situations in the past where I've been glad that records of student attempts couldn't be modified by the student.  For example, the "I know I uploaded it, I don't know why it's not showing up" would become a lot easier if they could say "oh, I must have accidentally deleted my submission".  Also, if a student resubmitted an assignment because one question was missing or came out blurry, I can see whether they took the opportunity to adjust any other questions.  I guess as long as some record is kept and accessible by the instructor, I would be okay with it.  But I would not want the case where the student could just delete all record of their initial submissions.

[nnorman]

In my case, I have an assignment that the class can 't get to.  I wanted to un-publish the assignment to avoid confusion.  But because there was a submission by a single student, I can not unpublish.  Of course I would be happy with just being able to unpublish the assignment with perhaps a warning about there being submissions.   I did up vote this item.

[nnorman]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is about the teacher deleting submissions.  I'm not sure how I'd feel if that included the student's ability to delete submissions.  I don't think I'd be in favor of that.

[tbunag]

Considering the use case involving pre-requisites, perhaps a better option would be to be able to "Mute" a student's submission or something similar, instead of deleting it entirely.  This wouldn't help the published/unpublished issue, but I see this as a very different use case.  An additional benefit of being able to mute a particular submission would be in streamlining grading for when a student has submitted multiple copies of the same assignment.