Canvas, How to compute Total for Group Assignments using percentages

[tommy5]

I am new to Canvas.

Say I create an assignment group within Assignments, and I call it HW (for homework).

Say I have three assignments in this group, namely: HW1, HW2 and HW3. I want a total score for the HW group because this will be 40% of the final grade.

Canvas will compute the total score for the HW group by summing all points earned in the three assignments, out of the total available ones. But each of my HW assignments has different points and I would instead like to use, as total score for the HW group, the average of the % score achieved in each assignment. However, this is not an option in Canvas and it is truly beyond me that this is so (the other one that is beyond me is how I cannot create a new column in the gradebook as I was able to do in Blackboard).

Overall, I like a lot of things in Canvas but the gradebook is very unsatisfying so far.

[james_whalley]

@tommy5 Yea. This is a common issue for folks coming from Blackboard. Sometimes people are able to adjust their assignment grading to work in Canvas' limited grading structures and sometimes I see users work in Excel for final grade calculation because of these limitations. I do see this feature idea that seems similar to what you are looking for, so you may want to keep an eye on that.

[tommy5]

@james_whalley Thanks for your answer, I appreciate it.

[JeffreyMeyers · Accepted solution]

The Canvas gradebook is very limited. We have a lot of professors use an Excel spreadsheet instead.

If you want to do it all in Canvas, the two easiest approaches in this case are to:

1. Change the points of each assignment so that they are all worth the same number of points.
2. Put each individual assignment in its own group. In your example, this would mean three groups each worth 13.33% rather than one group worth 40%.

[tommy5]

@JeffreyMeyers Thanks, I had thought of #2 as well. It is a very roundabout way of doing things, but at least it gets the job done.