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) 

[Renee_Carney]

 @michael_barbour  & cesbrandt 

I want to take a minute to thank you for your collegial conversation here!  I appreciate the grace and faith you have afforded us to understand why something might have been interpreted/built a little differently than you may have envisioned it.  Thanks for continuing to work with us to make Canvas more awesome!

[michael_barbour]

Hopefully we can get enough votes on the new thread. 

[adrienna_korsma]

Can someone share how you do this? I see it as resolved, but I can't figure out how to create a practice assignment that asks for a submission from students but DOESN'T create a column in the gradebook. Thanks for the help!

[RobDitto]

@adrienna_korsma, the feature added when this idea conversation was resolved still creates a gradebook column, but indicates in the column header (and to students) that the assignment won't contribute to the final course grade:

How do I exclude an assignment from the course's final grades?