[Gradebook] Add, Create, or Modify a Calculated or Total Column in the Gradebook

[thomas-rietz]

This was up, but archived.  See Add, Create, or Modify a Calculated or the Total Column in the Gradebook.

Being able to calculate things in the grade book beyond adding things up or weighting and adding seems like an absolutely necessary feature.  It seems like one of those that comes up repeatedly under various guises, but keeps getting archived.  But, I keep reading that there are lots of people who do more than just add things up to calculated grades.

[Gregory_Putman]

HI,

Just upvoted this.  I'm sure I've voted on other conversations/ideas that boil down to this exact same issue - so I'd bet the actual number of users that want to upvote this feature have been split between threads.

Over the past two or three weeks I've commented on just about 30 feature/idea/thingies and upvoted.  All of the ideas, etc., that I've voted on seem to go back to basic functioning of Canvas and many have comparisons to other LMS that we've been migrated from to Canvas.  I don't think that any of the threads I've commented and voted on started more recently than 2016 or very near then.  Is there not some other venue for us to discuss fixing basic functionality issues?  I understand that developing new features takes a lot of resources and a business needs to assess user interest before devoting resources and money to that, however something like the gradebook being too stripped down seems like something that Canvas should want to address in order to stop negative comparisons to competing products.

I saw in the above that someone mentioned Canvas wanting to encourage third party solutions.  And advice on how to do that?  Are there suggested third parties or is there another part of this community that I haven't found that puts us in contact with third parties that can do this?  Is that something that we would have to suggest as an idea and hope for enough social media upvotes?

[Pages and pages of a long, frustrated rant deleted.]

[russtuck]

I agree.  I'm puzzled at how Canvas can be very good at many things, but willfully bad in the gradebook.

(I always end up downloading the gradebook to a spreadsheet, hiding the 4x redundant columns so I can use it, and manually entering "override" grades. This deprives students of accurate calculations during the semester, and wastes my time at the end when it is most precious.  To add insult to injury, adding an "override" column requires 2 actions in different places in the right order.  Grading is already a lot of work, why make it needlessly harder?)