[Assignments] Move or Delete Incorrectly Submitted Assignments

[Chris_Hofer]

If a student submits an assignment to say week 2 folder when it should have been submitted to week 3, currently there is no way to move that assignment to the correct location as the Teacher.  This core functionality exists in all other LCS.LMS and should be considered for inclusion in Canvas's core modules.

Brought over from the old Canvas Community

Submitted by: Michael Black

Date: 6/3/2011

Votes: 112

[ambouche]

I ran into this just now -- I have an old assignment that when the course was copied over from a previous year somehow got "published" (I unpublished all assignments but apparently I missed one, or this one published itself in the copying process).    One of my eager-beaver students saw it and, although the assignment was not for the current week,  submitted to it even though it said the due date was years ago.  Now I cannot unpublish it, leading to extreme confusion. 

[Stef_retired]

 @ambouche ‌, you do have some interim solutions at your disposal, and it's possible you've already implemented some or all of these. While it's true that you can't unpublish the assignment because of the eager student's submission to it, you can change the Available Until date so additional students can't submit to it, change the points possible to zero, and edit the assignment description to read "Do not submit." Alternatively, you might be able to change the submission type to No Submission and the Display Grade to Not Graded (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10113-415241285 )  Last, you could enable the "Do not count this assignment toward the final grade" setting so the assignment doesn't appear in students' grades view (How do I exclude an assignment from the course's final grades? )

[ambouche]

Good suggestions!  Thank you!

[ambouche]

I couldn't unpublish but I was able to delete the assignment.

[jeffrey_weimer]

I view Speed Grader as a built-in cloud resource for Canvas. Owners of cloud resources should have the ability to review the history of documents submitted, control access permissions on documents as appropriate, and, yes, even delete files as desired and/or permitted. The Speed Grader in Canvas gives us NONE of these options. It is for this reason a poorly-implemented cloud resource. To be blunt, where it matters to be a viable cloud resource, I see the Speed Grader in Canvas as being more cumbersome, less feature-rich, and more frustrating to use than what Google Drive or Dropbox was when either of these two resources first started many years ago.

I suggest the options below should be implemented AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

* Allow instructors to LOCK or UNLOCK submission folders to prevent students from deleting files in them.

* Automatically LOCK a submission once it is annotated or graded (i.e. with no option to UNLOCK by anyone).

* Allow instructors to delete entire submission folders.

* Provide a robust, transparent method to allow instructors through students to review and manage all versions of the files that have been submitted through SpeedGrader.

[lhardy]

Quite frankly, Blackboard is much better in this respect! It is not unusual for students to accidentally upload a file to the wrong assignment. Blackboard allowed the faculty to remove the wrong file and open the link again for the student. It is crazy that the only way to do this in Canvas is by deleting the whole assignment.

[cms_hickss]

We just ran into this issue here. We had an instructor with a class with two students with the same name (first and last). The teacher put the wrong student into the student groups within Canvas, but assigned them in class. So "StudentWithSameName A" posted his group's work into the wrong group. 

The teacher has since moved the students into their correct work groups.

Canvas Support tells me there's no way to delete this submission and the student will need to resubmit...  but Group B can now see Group A's submission.

[kwiles]

I can't believe this is still a thing we're not able to do. Students need to be able to delete submissions  AND Teachers need to be able to delete submissions for a variety of reasons. We also need the ability to submit an assignment on a student's behalf in case they are having technical issues and emailed it to us instead..but want to use the handy speedgrader to grade it and log the assignment for the student. How do we get this ball rolling, does there need to be a new submission request??? it's open for voting and has over 200 votes.

[shannon_reed]

Ran into same situation. Would be helpful to be able to delete a students submission and allow them to retake.

[dward3]

There should be some kind of secure front-end access (for Canvas admins only) to remove submission content that was uploaded by mistake and contains confidential info or PII.  This came up last week in one of our schools, and while the "solution" of reaching out to Instructure support was adequate and didn't take too long, it was far from perfect, especially considering the age of, and support for, this feature.