Bug? Re-importing CSV into gradebook reapplies late penalties

[patrick_blanche]

In the new gradebook, I have an assignment ("Assignment 1") that had Late Penalties applied.

I export the Gradebook to CSV, added a column for an external assignment ("Assignment 2"), and imported the modified CSV back in to the Gradebook. Students who had penalties applied in Assignment1 get the penalty reapplied.

If a student had 86/100 and a late penalty of -10, their score should be 76. After re-import, it was 66.

When checking the assignment, I can see that the grade initially allocated was 86 in the rubric, but the grade at the top is 76, and the penalty is reapplied, for a final grade of 66.

I had to manually correct grades for all the students who had submitted late to Assignment 1. (Not fun.)

I think this is a bug, but I cannot check because I don't want to mess up my gradebook again, and having to redo it all again.

Nonetheless, steps to replicate:

1. 1. Have an assignment. Check "Automatically apply deduction to late submissions" in the options.
2. Export Gradebook to CSV.
3. Add a column or modify an unrelated grade.
4. Import modified CSV into Gradebook.

Actual results:

• The final grade before import becomes the "raw" grade after import.
• Late policy is re-applied to that new raw grade, resulting in the late penalty being applied twice (or as many times as you re-import.)
• The raw assignment grade does not coincide with the grade on the rubric, and the difference is equal to the late penalty (or a multiple of that if re-import several times).

Expected results:

• Raw and final assignment grades should be identical before and after re-import.

[ericwerth]

Hello  @patrick_blanche and welcome to the Community!  Thanks for bringing this up.  I haven't tried this in the new gradbook but it is good to know what you are experiencing.  It will be interesting to see if anyone here has noticed the same behavior.  Have you reported this to Canvas Support as well?  They would know if this has been previously reported and can test to see if they can replicate the error.  If it hasn't been reported it would be good to have a case created for this so that the engineering team could look in to a fix.

All the best!

[patrick_blanche]

Thank you ericwerth‌, my institution has deactivated links to Canvas support, but i have contacted my institution IT and hopefully they can escalate to Canvas.

[ericwerth]

Hi  @patrick_blanche .  I thought I would check back and see if you ever heard from your IT department whether they found a solution to the problem you described or if Canvas Support had insight.  Hopefully something was figured out!  I am going to go ahead and mark this as "assumed answered" for now, but this can be changed if needed and marking the question as assumed answered doesn't prevent continued discussion in the thread.

All the best!

[jwillin]

As a temporary fix, could you just leave that column out when you import new assignment?

[deanhougen]

I just encountered this same bug. It is exactly as you described. Moreover, while John Willingham has a good suggestion for a simple workaround for this instance, it isn't sufficient for general use. For example, if the semester is over and you want to replace all missing scores with zero, they could be in any column. However, the late penalties might be in any column too. The bottom line is that Canvas is broken for importing scores when you have late penalties enabled.