[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

[olexar]

Just last week, I ran across a couple of scenarios where I would've liked to delete a submission. In the first, a student inadvertently started the wrong quiz. I could tell from the quiz log that she indeed started, immediately closed the quiz, and emailed me about it. The second scenario was after a student reported technical difficulties while taking the quiz on his phone. (I require screenshots for reported difficulties, and he sent one. All my sleuthing efforts supported his report.)

In both of these scenarios, if I allow another attempt, he/she could review the previous submission (the incomplete or partially complete submission) prior to re-taking the quiz. While I do use question pools, some questions may reappear. Without the ability to delete the attempt, I simply go with an EX grade vs allowing an extra attempt; however, I would rather not do the EX.

I should add that the ability to disallow review of ANY kind, before a certain date, could've helped as well. See my idea that got eaten by the panda-cat:

[kona]

These are great user cases and mirror some of the same issues/problems we've seen on our campus!

[amcallister]

Not exactly the same request, but we want a way of an administrator programmatically deleting all student submissions from a semester 1 year after the end of that semester. We need to trim our data storage and some of these submissions can be large, and there is no reason to keep the student submissions in Canvas.

[kona]

 @amcallister ​, I don't hear of many people who are concerned about data storage/usage who use Canvas, but couldn't you just delete the whole course? As long as you save the course number you can always go back and restore the course if needs be - How do I restore a deleted course in an account?

[amcallister]

 @kona  we don't want to delete the course, because the faculty and their Faculty Office wants to retain their materials for future reference: getting agreement around that is even harder. It's the student file submissions we want to delete because no grade appeals can happen after a certain deadline so there is declining value in that data. I'll have to inquire more with Instructure about data file storage.

Thanks,

A.

[kona]

Definitely talk to your CSM about the data file storage. We've been fully using Canvas since 2012 and haven't even come close to reaching our original contract data limit. I also know for us that it's important to retain the information for accreditation purposes. If one of our accrediting bodies (for our College and for some of our various programs - Health Information Technology, Nursing, Surg Tech, etc) comes in and wants to see student information we have to be able to pull it up ASAP.

Side note, if your faculty/faculty office want to keep the course content you could create master courses for them for each course and then have them copy the course over into the master at the end of each semester and then you can go through and delete the course. You could also technically have them upload their entire courses into Canvas Commons - and only share it with themselves or those who needed access. That would save all of the content, make it easy to add into new courses, share with anyone they want, and you could then delete all the courses.

[marthazumack]

It's really frustrating that with so many votes, that idea was shelved. I hope Canvas will come back to it, because it is still causing us trouble, and I imagine is for many others!

[marthazumack]

 @canvas_admin  - whenever we have an assignment submission as a prerequisite, we actually set the prerequisite to be a minimum grade (we put 1). This prevents students from being able to submit any old thing to get around the prerequisite. This only works because we have tutors grading submissions very quickly, so it might not work in other kinds of situations.

[adenico]

I'd like to add that my, "pleeeease let us do this" vote comes from a really problematic technical issue: If a student's paper gets corrupted as it is being uploaded into an assignment, or if a corrupted file  is uploaded, it makes it impossible to use the grading function for ALL papers within that assignment. If you cannot remove the corrupted paper, there is no recourse to fix the problem and the whole assignment for all students is then corrupted. I have had to ask my students to resubmit their papers days after they were due! The grading function regularly saves me hours of time grading with a rubric, and it's one of my top favorite features. But if it's that easy to corrupt SpeedGrading, then this significantly affects my use of (and my preference for) Canvas. Please consider either fixing this really problematic bug or allowing us to erase files if necessary.

[Stef_retired]

 @adenico ​, does this (a student's paper getting corrupted or a corrupted file being uploaded) happen often? In nearly five years of using Canvas--during which time I've had literally thousands of files uploaded by students to my assignments--I have not had this happen once. I'm not being snarky, just curious; this is honestly the first time I've ever heard of this.