[SIS] Allow syncing of text based grades to SIS
I grade my students on a rubric based narrative grading scale in Aeries, our school's SIS. In Aeries I have a set of narrative grades which are the following: EXCEEDED [5] MET [4] DEVELOPING [3] BEGINNING [2] NOT BEGINNING [1]. Aeries requires that a number be associated with the narrative grades so it can calculate an overall rubric score.
I created the same grading scheme in Canvas, but when I sync to Aeries only the number of points a student gets passed back. Based on the information here: Does Grade Passback include letter grades? - it appears that OneRoster only passes numerical data to a SIS. At the moment, I am syncing and then manually changing each score to the correlated narrative grade in Aeries. I have pondered getting rid of the narrative grades, and making each assessment out of five points to preserve the rubric grading system in my class to solve the issue since grades facing students would now just be numbers from 1-5. The use case I which would not be solved by this adjustment are quizzes I give students through an LTI tool. At the moment, I need to get student's quiz scores, for example a 5/10, and turn that into my rubric grading scale out of five or from NOT BEGINNING to EXCEEDED. I can do that using a grading scheme in Canvas, where a percentage on the quizzes correlates to a letter grade. I cannot then sync that to Aeries, and if I did, the points or percentage would sync instead of their letter grade.
OneRoster grade passback should be able to pass text-based data to a SIS so that teachers can have more varied grading systems, and reduce the time it takes to use a non-points based grading system on Canvas with another SIS which accommodates text based grades. When it comes to why, first there is an option to give and show students letter grades based on a scheme in Canvas already. For teachers who need to then sync to a SIS and display assignment grades as letter grades, it should be easy for them to sync to their SIS.
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