Account-level Default grading scheme (& determination)

[ldoughty]

Hello everyone,

    I'm a new Canvas Admin for my university, and I'm trying to find an answer that doesn't seem to be available online anywhere. Help would be appreciated.

   We have 4 "Grading Schemes" on the account level set up. When an instructor sets up their course, they click the checkbox: "Enable course grading scheme" and some move on without clicking the "set a grading scheme" link that appears.

This leads to these courses having a default grading scheme that is not the institution standard. However, we can find no way to "set" the institution standard, nor any documentation on how it determines this default value.

As you can guess, this has lead to a lot of trouble for us as we're coming up on grade export time and we did not realize this problem until now... So I have 2 questions:

1) What is the "Default Grading Scheme" -- as in, how does canvas decide which one is the 4 schemes we have in place is the default if the user makes no scheme selection? I thought, at first, that it might be the one that can't be edited, but that's not the case.

2) Is the API calling the only non-manual way to resolve this across the entire institution?

I see setting an account-level default was proposed in the past as an enhancement:

This seems to be the exact thing I was hoping to find, but looks like that proposal didn't make it.

Thanks for any guidance you all can provide.

-Lee

[Robbie_Grant]

 @ldoughty ​,

We just went through this whole process over the summer.  We paid Professional Services to finish the Grading Standars API.  We now use that API to choose the default grading scheme after we load courses from our SIS.  We have programs that do this for us automatically for all 7000+ courses each major semester.

You can find more info on the API at:

Grading Standards - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation

Robbie

[shane_ohara · Accepted solution]

Hi,

We have recently come on board with Canvas as well and went through this same issue. I will answer your questions and tell you what I have done.

1) What is the "Default Grading Scheme" -- as in, how does canvas decide which one is the 4 schemes we have in place is the default if the user makes no scheme selection? I thought, at first, that it might be the one that can't be edited, but that's not the case.

The default scheme will have the identifier of "1" in the system. This is to say that if you run:

curl https://<URL>/api/v1/accounts/1/grading_standards \

-H 'Authorization: Bearer <token>'

It will return all the schemes for the account. #1 should be the default as it comes stock with the instance.

2) Is the API calling the only non-manual way to resolve this across the entire institution?

Yes, you need to make an API call to set the scheme for courses.

Here is what I do. I have a PERL script with my curl command. Inside the script is the scheme number, so when it is run the scheme is enabled and the default is set. We run this once per semester. To apply to each course, I use a text file of all the canvas_course_id values for the term. The PERL script calls it and loops through each of them to apply.

I am willing to share this with you by email if you would like it. Let me know.

Shane

[ldoughty]

Thanks for this info Shane

From this, I was able to identify the ID's of the schemes we have:

"id":2, "title":"Letter Grades w/ +/-"

"id":41,"title":"Letter Grades w/ +/- (Specific Dept.)" (current default)

[some others, but none ID 1]

So without a '1', the default is going to be the most recently created grading scheme it seems.

If you could e-mail me that script, it would be helpful. While I'm not sure if our development team uses Perl, I'm sure they can read, understand, and re-write in a language they prefer if needed.

Edit: Found a secret bonus level (scheme)! Will post separately.

[ldoughty]

Apparently, there's a grading scheme with ID "0" that exists in the system.

This scheme:

• Has no name
• Is not accessible in grading API calls (but is identified by ID number in courses API)
• Is not shown on any Admin screens
• Is not available in canvas data exports
• Is not editable by any means

The only way we identified this exists was because we couldn't figure out which scale the system was using for some courses that returned an ID of "0" as their grading scheme. We assumed "0" was a placeholder for "default" until one of the developers noticed there was a scale hidden in plain sight to teachers...

For admins without courses: create a sandbox course, go to "Settings" for the course, check the check box to "enable course grading scheme", then click the "Set a scheme" link. The scale that appears is actually the "hidden scheme"... In plain sight. (Note: I've read some people say ID "1" is the default, but our university deleted ID 1 at some point during initial setup and our standard scheme was input as ID 2)

If you click "select another scheme" (or manage schemes), this hidden scheme is not listed as a choice. If you pick a new scheme, you can not get back to this hidden scheme unless you un-check and re-check the "enable course grading scheme" check box.

We're going to fix this by API calls for future semesters.

Hopefully other admins/schools will find this useful...

[phanley]

I notice this aside at the top of the grading scheme doc, which I thought was weird but didn't worry about it until I saw this post: Without a grading scheme, scores are not measured against any specific standard.

Do you think that's grading scheme 0?

[janagamn]

@shane_ohara - Can you share the PERL script to me via email ? We are in the same boat and any help is appreciated. 

[KStachowski]

@shane_ohara - Can you share the PERL script to me via email?

[hood]

Would setting your institution's grade scheme in the all template courses, from which your courses are built, solve the problem?  We have tested this and it seems to work, but I'm wondering if there are any issues around it?

Kind regards,

Dennis Hood
Senior Manager, Learning Management System

Princeton University

[rkahn]

Dennis,

We are considering a Template approach right now to set a default grading scheme.  But certain courses use unique grading schemes so they would have to select a different scheme or else students would get the "wrong" grade.  So that gives me pause (best to "do no harm", as the saying goes.) Have you implemented a default grading scheme via Template feature and if so how did it go?

Bob Kahn

Hudson County Community College