Quizzes with an Essay Question Should Not Be Automatically Graded

[masuccm]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas  Learn more about voting...

  Idea will be open for vote Wed. July 1, 2015 - Wed. October 7, 2015  Learn more about voting...

I have assigned a Timed Essay to my students. Once they complete the essay, Canvas is putting a zero into the grade book, bringing the students' grades down. Of course, the students do not understand why this is happening.

Even if I mute the assignment, the category still records the zero, which affects the grade.

The only option I've had is to put the assignment in a new 0% category. The quiz is still graded, but at least it doesn't affect the student's grade.

Of course, this requires me to remember to move it back to the category once I've graded the exam.

This is entirely unnecessary.

There should be a feature to turn this off. If a quiz has an essay or short response, no grade should enter the grade book.

Honestly, the way it's done makes no logical sense.

  Response from Instructure

Hey All, Please see the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-07-18)  for details. We've added a Quiz icon in the gradebook until the manually graded items have been graded. I hope this helps meet your needs and please let us know if there something more we can do to make this a better experience for you and your students.

[tfreeman]

This new feature is a good idea but instructors are frequently adding essay questions worth zero points to the end of quizzes used often daily for just in time teaching and large online courses and it causes these folks a problem.  Can this feature be tweaked so that questions worth zero points do not cause the Quiz (Q) icon to be displayed?

[crafte]

We have been getting reports from students who are confused about the total grades they see on the global grades page versus what is seen when they click on Grades in the course. As long as the 'Q' icon is listed for a quiz, the total grade the students see under Grades in the course is lower than the grade they see on the global grades page. This has been causing some confusion among our students. They do not know which total grade is correct. Can this be changed so the total grade on the global grades page always matches the total grade shown in the course itself?

[asatkins]

We noticed that as well. Canvas has been aware for a little while and I think they're actually working on it right now. We received a ticket update this morning that they are working on a QA fix that is going into beta soon, so hopefully it'll be all fixed up before we know it

[crafte]

 @asatkins ​, thank you very much for the information. I will keep checking the beta release notes if the fix has been included.