Truly Ungraded Assignment

[cesbrandt]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

I'm sorry for the odd title, I just can't seem to come up with a good one that describes what I'm going to be suggesting. We use "ungraded" assignments in quite a few courses as a way to evaluate the progress of our students. Now, I know we can set the Display Grade as to Not Graded and it will force the Points value to 0, hide the assignment in the gradebook (students), and disabled the Submission Type. However, I propose a variation similar to how Practice Quizzes work. A can Practice Quiz can still be evaluated like a normally, but they do not take any role in the gradebook calculations.

Basically, my idea is to disable the forcing of a point-value of 0 and the disabling of the Submission Type. This way students are still able to submit to the assignment, using whatever submission type the assignment calls for, and the instructor can still provide feedback, but the assignment wouldn't appear in the gradebook. To accompany this, I would recommend the removal of the Assignment Group selection when choosing this.

A great use for an assignment like this would be for progressive assignments, like term projects. The student/group would submit the materials they are expected to have completed by that point in the class and the instructor and evaluate the material. The students could then take the evaluation and rework the material for the final submission. An alternative use would be for review assignments. It's not uncommon to see ungraded review assignments used as a means to evaluate the material that is being retained by students in the interest of improving the delivery of material (not really possible without the ability for students to submit something).

Here's an example of what an assignment edit page would look like:

The assignment would look and act like a normal assignment to the student, except it wouldn't appear in the gradebook. Maybe add a note under the Due/Points/Available line identifying that the assignment would not be used when determining their final grade.

  Instructure Comment

For More information Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-08-06) 

[peter_lombardo]

I found this post when researching assignment submissions. Is there a way that allows students to upload a document when it is selected as an ungraded assignment?

Also, is there a way to remove the points display from an ungraded assignment or an incomplete/complete assignment?

[michael_barbour]

With all due respect to the Canvas folks, but this item has not been completed - at least not based on the way the original post indicates.

I reviewed the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-08-06)  and it still doesn't allow for submission type options if the instructor selects "Not Graded."  In fact, there is a new feature idea for this topic at https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12306-options-for-not-graded-assignments to address the fact that this was not actually included in this update (even though Canvas claims that it is)!

[Renee_Carney]

Thanks  @michael_barbour  - I'm taking a look now

[Renee_Carney]

Michael.  

I read through the release notes again and reviewed the idea, as well as the new one you linked to.  I agree with our original decision to mark this complete - it is in fact different than the idea you linked to, and here's my justification.

• The original poster states "The assignment would look and act like a normal assignment to the student, except it wouldn't appear in the gradebook."  We interpreted that to read that they would like grading, submission, and other assignment options, but also the ability to not count it toward the final grade.
• The new idea you linked to wants truly "non graded" assignments that have all of the settings of another assignment, just no grading options.

[michael_barbour]

I would argue that "The assignment would look and act like a normal assignment to the student, except it wouldn't appear in the gradebook." means that it would have all of the features of a normal assignment, which includes the options that are available for submission.  I mean students can submit a file for a normal assignment.

[cesbrandt]

 @michael_barbour , while this is what I had originally hoped for when I submitted this idea, the entire gradebook system seems to revolve around assignments. Graded quizzes get an assignment to appear in the gradebook. Graded discussions get an assignment to appear in the gradebook. Assignments are assignments and appear in the gradebook, regardless of whether they're graded or not. It's not entirely unexpected that Instructure would prefer to patch a solution in than change how it fundamentally works.

I had hoped that the Not Graded option would be modified to allow submission methods, due dates, etc. while eliminating its presence in the gradebook (why would an ungraded activity need to be assigned to a gradebook category?), as demonstrated in my proposed mock-up. However, the more important aspect of the idea was the ability to fully configure the assignment as an assignment (submission methods needed) without it counting towards the final grade. This was implemented, if not as I'd expected/hoped.

As the original idea submitter for this, I agree that the idea has been adequately implemented. I may not think it's as good as expected, but it does what it needs to.

I'll reply to the new idea about this with some feedback to help point out that the idea is really to push for a move towards the whole picture that was originally desired from this idea.

[michael_barbour]

So it wasn't developed in the way that you had actually recommended cesbrandt, but they did do enough to allow you to work around the issue.  I'll buy that...

[cesbrandt]

Essentially, yes. Would I have preferred what I'd submitted? Of course, the current use of "Not Graded" is a redundancy of the "No Submission" option, except you still have the other assignment configuration options with "No Submission."

Personally, I don't see any reason to eliminate the assignment configuration options just because it won't count towards the final grade. A popular use of this would be practice assignments meant to help the students work up to the actual assignments.

Having said that, they did give us the underlying control we sought in a round-about method from what we'd hoped for. In the interest of supporting the idea, I've voted for and supplied what I hope is a clarification of the idea you'd provided a link to.

[michael_barbour]

Thanks for chiming in on the other thread!  I think it important to get some traction over there because you'd think that this would be an easy feature to incorporate given that this is already an assignment feature and the item is essentially an assignment.

[cesbrandt]

Ah, but it isn't already a feature. As I mentioned, they didn't actually change the behaviour of assignments when they made this change. Instead, they patched in an override that if detected would produce visual changes to explain that the assignment doesn't count towards the final grade and to be ignored in the actual grade calculations.

They could adapt this override, but it was be a hackish solution to what would otherwise be a redefining of the core placement of assignments within the Canvas architecture.

In my personal opinion, it is both inspired and short-sighted to have made assignments the only content type present in the gradebook. It's inspired in that it (having not actually looked at the code) should simplify the gradebook code needed to list all activities being graded by having them all in the same format. However, you then have the issue of making changes to assignments would affect everything that's graded and requiring more code just to differentiate between what should and shouldn't be affected. What I think should've been the design is to have all activity types have the option within their respective formats to be graded or not graded (which they all do), but standardize the information to be supplied to the gradebook within said formats.

Anyways, I'm digressing. This particular idea has been implemented sufficiently that I think we can drop out of it, but we can always continue with the minutia in the newer idea (which is essentially picking at that, anyways).