[Assignments] weighting in assignment groups

[jlamb1]

It seems this has been a reoccurring request for some time now, but is not generating the votes needed to get attention. Perhaps it is time to try again!

Canvas would benefit greatly from being able to allocate a weighting to individual assignments within an assignment group. At present, rather than an overarching "Geography" assignment group for HASS, I have to put each individual assignment in their own group to distribute task weighting for the course. HASS also covers economics, politics and history - that makes for A LOT of assignment groups to break up the weighting for tasks.

In my view, it would be much simpler to have the Assignment Group that aligns with the unit or module being taught and has a weighting for the overall course, and an individual assignment weighting function within the group without having to fiddle around with the points. I think most teachers would agree that there is enough of a workload without adjusting and readjusting points to weight assignments according to their worth. I for one wold love to be able to do this with a quick click of a button instead of laboriously pouring over numbers.

Please vote up on this - it is clear that many people are asking for this function in many different ways.

Gradebook: weigh assignment within assignment group

"Lock Grade" option in Gradebook

Weighting Assignments

[cesbrandt]

We all feel the pain of this missing functionality, amongst others. It took us a while to fully get on board with the loss of this one, but we don't dictate the development schedule of Instructure (as much as we may want to). It's not a matter of excusing Instructure from having to address to idea request or apologize for it not being done. It's simply how they operate the development of Canvas.

All we can really do (unless you want to pay Instructure to develop specific functionality as a priority) is give our support for ideas submitted on the community, share with each other how we try to compensate for the lack of a function/feature, and, if you're fluent in Ruby on Rails, hop in the GitHub and developer IRC to help develop functionality (not working for Instructure).

I would love to see this feature added.

We've recent encountered a new concept for us that we had never had to address before: pass x activities with a y% or fail the entire class, without adjusting the weights of the categories. Our solution is a bit absurd: pull the gradebook via API, do the calculations in our own script, and assign a 0 or "EX" to an "override" assignment worth enough to fail the student regardless of the rest of the gradebook. This script runs every 30 minutes to ensure the gradebook is kept relatively up-to-date in reflecting the current state of a student's grade.

A weighting system, ideally with an option to say "this category must have an average of x to pass" would be perfect to avoid this sort of workaround.

[kboyke]

I will add my voice to this also.

Interesting that the first post I see in this category is from 2016 - and in it the author states that this idea has gone around the block a few times already and perhaps it is time to try to get this feature added again. 

So how long must users ask for something...?

I understand... Canvas must get tired of hearing, "when we used Blackboard we were able to...."  but at the same time, why not listen and bring forth the elements people have come to rely on. 

Much of the frustration comes from discovering, mid-semester, that you can't do something you were expecting to be able to do. 

[Julie4110]

As to a nested assignment group function/feature:

I have created assignment groups that have 0% weight towards a final grade. The grades from these groups are brought MANUALLY into other assignment groups that are weighted. This is a work-around for not having a nested assignment group feature.

If a nested assignment group feature is FINALLY implemented, it would be helpful to have some control over what appears in the student grade summary, such as hiding the lower tier weight hierarchy, to avoid a confusing presentation of the tiers. This is an issue I have now with the work around.

[stew_rhs]

It is outrageous that basic gradebook functions like altering the wieght of a single assignment/quiz is not available without time-consuming, clunky work-arounds.

If I give a 10 point quiz that has important material on it and I want it to to be weighted at 20 points, that function should be available to me.  

BOO to Canvas for making us wait and wait for something so obvious, easy, and important.  

While I'm at it, I will also complain about a related issue: the inability to have control over curving an assignments (the existing Canvas curve function is useless).  If the same 10 point quiz has a bad question and I want to make the test out of 9 points, that option also should be available.

[mstevens9]

How do I up vote? Why is this process confusing?

[heather_coulter]

Many schools use 'skills' based assessments rather than those that assess final products.  As an example, I wouldn't use a 'tests' grading category, but a 'knowledge and understanding' category.  Within my knowledge grading category, I might have different types of tasks (tests, quizzes, tasks and activities) that assess how much knowledge a student has.  It would be great if there was a way to use factor weighting within the category.  For example, how can we make a test count for a larger percentage than a quiz when they are both housed within the same grading category?  Factor weighting would help us to achieve this.  It is available in other LMS systems such as OnCampus--you can give more importance or weight to one item in a category so that it counts for more of the overall percentage. 

[toddandresen]

Have the ability to give individual weights to assignments within a group, independent of the "score" you have given them. For example two tests in the test category. One had 55 pts possible and the other had 78 pts possible, but I want them to be weighted the same towards the overall test score.

[smazzenga]

I'd like to add to this one (and bump it up in the process)!

This is currently a feature AND a bug:

When I use weighted groups in Assignments, I also use points.

I want to see BOTH percentages AND points. Currently, the only way to do this is to turn off weighting and manually enter points, at which point I see percentages AND points in student view. Why can't I see the points average when I've got weighted calculations turned on? This seems weird... BUT... it gets worse. Read on....

Here's the bug part: 

The percentage averages are NOT the same between the weighted calculations and points calculations. In fact, they are off by about one percentage point. Something is wonky on the back-end there. The percentage averages should be the same, regardless. 

So I see this has been kicked around for a few years, but I didn't have time to read through 8 pages of comments. 

Can we get average points on the weighted calculations, too? 

To give a visual of what I'm talking about, here is a shot of a points-only student view: 

Points-only, no weighted calculations

Here's the exact same student, same grades, with weighted calculations turned on: 

Weighted calculations turned on

As you can see, there's something off somewhere. 

[jeffkitson]

Our institution is in the process of switching from Moodle to Canvas. While I appreciate so much of what Canvas has to offer, I'd like to add my voice to this discussion. It is insane that individual items can't be weighted in a category. 

The gradebook is a core functionality and this request is applying some simple math. Please don't let the tail wag the dog any longer. 

[cmdavis_prccedu]

Yes, we need this!  We need to be able to add sub-categories to the weighted columns!