CANVAS is giving 100% credit for all assignments when they have not been attempted. How do I fix it?

[AmandaAtkinson]

Currently, I have CANVAS set up to give an automatic 0 for assignments not completed by the due date.  Previously, assignments that had not been attempted showed up with a ' - ' mark in Grades. Now, students get a false impression of their grades, as it appears they have 100% for all assignments. How do I get CANVAS to go back to a '-' instead of full credit and better represent the student's scores?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AmandaAtkinson,

It sounds to me like you may have two different things going on here, but I'd like to confirm...

For the missing assignments, you have your course missing policy set to give a 0, correct?  If your assignments are Canvas online submissions, this should work great, and a lot of faculty set Canvas up like this at my institution.  If your assignments are on paper of through an external tool (like a publisher's website), the missing policy may not automatically apply though.\

So, with that being said about the missing policy in general, setting that up should not cause students to receive an automatic grade of 100% on anything, which is why I think something else is at play here.  Can you tell us what kind of assignments the ones where students received 10% are?  Are they Canvas online assignments (like a file upload), quizzes, 3rd party assessmentc, etc?  There is an option to set a default grade for an assignment, but you or another teacher in the course would have to deliberately do that, so I don't think that happened here.  I'm wondering if these are 3rd party assignments and the 3rd party system is sending grades back to Canvas, as that seems like the most logical thing in my head right now.

Please do let us know more info when you are able, and someone will try to help you figure out what may be going on.

-Chris

[James · Accepted solution]

@AmandaAtkinson 

I want to expand on what @chriscas wrote about the missing grades policy.

The gradebook late and missing settings can easily be misunderstood and when they first came out, a lot of people got things backwards.

• The grade for missing submissions is what grade they should receive, not the deduction. A 0 means they get 0% of the point value. 100% means they get all of the points.
• The late submission deduction is a deduction, not the grade they should receive. A 0 means there is no penalty for late work. A 100% means they lose all of the point values if late.

To get Canvas to go back, you would need to go to the Gradebook and check settings. You can check your settings on the late policies tab and adjust as necessary. There is a warning that changing the late policy will affect previously graded submissions. That warning does not appear with the missing submissions assignment. However, if you look at the notes at the top of the How do I apply a Missing Submission policy in the Gradebook? lesson in the Instructors Guide, it explicitly says that setting a missing submission policy affects all assignments in a course, including assignments with due dates in the past.

That behavior is consistent with putting 100 for the missing policy rather than a 0. If that is the case, then one would think that setting it to 0 should fix the issue. But if you keep reading in the notes, it says that disabling a course missing submission policy does not revert the grades that were submitted when the policy was in effect.

I would straighten out the policy first. Make sure the grade for missing submissions is at 0% and then apply the settings. Then, if you don't want to use the policy at all, uncheck the box and hit apply settings.

If things don't revert, you will need to go into the gradebook and manually fix the grades. You can use the gradebook history page to see what grades were changed if you're not sure which 100% scores were legitimate.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AmandaAtkinson,

It sounds to me like you may have two different things going on here, but I'd like to confirm...

For the missing assignments, you have your course missing policy set to give a 0, correct?  If your assignments are Canvas online submissions, this should work great, and a lot of faculty set Canvas up like this at my institution.  If your assignments are on paper of through an external tool (like a publisher's website), the missing policy may not automatically apply though.\

So, with that being said about the missing policy in general, setting that up should not cause students to receive an automatic grade of 100% on anything, which is why I think something else is at play here.  Can you tell us what kind of assignments the ones where students received 10% are?  Are they Canvas online assignments (like a file upload), quizzes, 3rd party assessmentc, etc?  There is an option to set a default grade for an assignment, but you or another teacher in the course would have to deliberately do that, so I don't think that happened here.  I'm wondering if these are 3rd party assignments and the 3rd party system is sending grades back to Canvas, as that seems like the most logical thing in my head right now.

Please do let us know more info when you are able, and someone will try to help you figure out what may be going on.

-Chris

[James · Accepted solution]

@AmandaAtkinson 

I want to expand on what @chriscas wrote about the missing grades policy.

The gradebook late and missing settings can easily be misunderstood and when they first came out, a lot of people got things backwards.

• The grade for missing submissions is what grade they should receive, not the deduction. A 0 means they get 0% of the point value. 100% means they get all of the points.
• The late submission deduction is a deduction, not the grade they should receive. A 0 means there is no penalty for late work. A 100% means they lose all of the point values if late.

To get Canvas to go back, you would need to go to the Gradebook and check settings. You can check your settings on the late policies tab and adjust as necessary. There is a warning that changing the late policy will affect previously graded submissions. That warning does not appear with the missing submissions assignment. However, if you look at the notes at the top of the How do I apply a Missing Submission policy in the Gradebook? lesson in the Instructors Guide, it explicitly says that setting a missing submission policy affects all assignments in a course, including assignments with due dates in the past.

That behavior is consistent with putting 100 for the missing policy rather than a 0. If that is the case, then one would think that setting it to 0 should fix the issue. But if you keep reading in the notes, it says that disabling a course missing submission policy does not revert the grades that were submitted when the policy was in effect.

I would straighten out the policy first. Make sure the grade for missing submissions is at 0% and then apply the settings. Then, if you don't want to use the policy at all, uncheck the box and hit apply settings.

If things don't revert, you will need to go into the gradebook and manually fix the grades. You can use the gradebook history page to see what grades were changed if you're not sure which 100% scores were legitimate.

[AmandaAtkinson]

I've noticed no change from adjusting the late submission policy or automatic assigning 0 for late assignments. No assignments are due at this time. Once a student completes an assignment, CANVAS does record a score. In the students individual grades page, they are getting the 100%, and it does reflect that the activity has not been completed. There is one student who does not have the 100% for all assignments. Until I find out what is happening, I'm going to manually change everyone to 0. I usually import content from one course to the next, and there has never been an issue before. 

[chriscas]

Hi @AmandaAtkinson,

Are all of your course assignments quizzes?  I ask this because quizzes are generally the only thing that Canvas itself would be able to auto-grade (and even then, only if all of the quiz questions were types that had defined correct answers, like true/false, multiple choice, etc).  The only other way I know that things would be auto graded that we haven't talked about (quizzes and missing policy) would be if the assignments are using a 3rd party tool and that tool is providing some kind of grade passback to Canvas.

Manually changing your grades is probably the quick fix for now, but it would be good to figure out the cause of your issue so it doesn't keep recurring in future courses or for future assignments in your current course/

-Chris

[James · Accepted solution]

If it was a survey quiz, then the students would get full points if they submitted. However, that shouldn't be showing as 100% unless they completed the survey or there was a late or missing grade policy in place.

Another possibility -- not tested by me -- is if the late submission policy had the lowest possible grade set to 100%. Then any student who didn't get it in by the due dates could see the 100%.

There was one other situation where I've seen something like this -- but they were all 0's since that's what my missing grade policy was. I had copied content from one class into another. Somehow I didn't get the dates adjusted before I tweaked something. Canvas thought everything for that assignment was late and gave everybody 0's (that was my policy for late work). Even though the assignment wasn't due for the class I copied it into, I think it was for the class I copied it from. If you cannot tell, I don't remember the exact particulars of how to repeat it. I just know that I now make sure to check the dates before I publish anything. It may have just been editing the assignment to set the dates. Sorry I cannot remember.

And yes, I had to manually go through the gradebook and delete all those zeros. Before I made it a point to check the dates before publishing, it happened in a live class and students were freaking out over their zeros for assignments that weren't due yet. I don't want to cause them frustration like that, so now I try to make sure I get all the assignments ready before the class starts but double check things if I have to copy in during a term.

[polagrj]

I have this issue. And folks are making up random answers that simply do not apply. 

[James]

@polagrj 

I suggest you click the Help button in Canvas and report a problem.

Whenever new and strange situations like this one arise, we struggle to find potential ways, even if they are way out in left-field, that might explain it. They often require innovative thought and stretching the imagination. That might make them seem random, but they far from it.

There is a similar issue going on now where people are getting 0's for assignments that aren't yet due. That sounds similar enough that it influenced our suggestions for getting 100's. However, we had to try to turn it around into ways that it would give 100% instead of 0%. In Canvas, that could be due to people who have misconfigured their late policies. When late policies first came out, they were confusing and people frequently misunderstood.

Be aware that the answer that Canvas Support is giving to people in the other situation is -- at best -- partially incorrect. They are telling people the zeros that it can happen when you copy course content with a previous date into a course. That is correct. They then tell you to turn off the missing / late policies before you copy the content. If they mean the new blank course that you're copying into, that's just wrong because we have it off and it's the course copy that turns it on. If they mean the original course you're copying from, that may involve changing policies in a course that has grades in it.

It's possible that if you removed dates when you copied content, then it may not be an issue.

It's a bug that Canvas should fix, but it's not on their list of known issues. Instead, they try to put it on something that the user is doing wrong. It's happening too much this semester to seasoned users who know what to look for (it happened to both my wife and I teaching at different schools). That's the "at best" part of their solution. They put it out there as "this can happen", which is true, but it's happening even when that situation is not true. There are other situations where it occurs, so they are sending people down a rabbit hole as well.

I would encourage you to return here once you have the issue resolved and share the solution so we can be aware the next time someone asks about it.