Delta Math Passback Repeated Comments on Assignments (and flagged late)

[KClarkson16]

Edited to add: The major issue actually is that it is flagging assignments as late, even if they earned 100% at the due date/time when the grade is passedback/updated after the due date.

I have my Delta Math assignments set to "passback" the grade to Canvas at the due date/time. I believe new this year is that when Canvas imports the grade, it includes an automatic comment on the assignment, "DeltaMath Grade Passback." This is not a notable problem if a student completes the assignment on time AND does not revisit the assignment for extra practice.

For students who are completing work late, it appears their grade is updated every time they earn a fractional part of credit. This results in a comment on the assignment in Canvas for every single individual question they complete on Delta Math.

For students who revisit a topic for extra practice, they also get repeated comments for every additional practice question they get, and it subsequently flags their assignment as late (because the grade is updated after the due date).

Is there a way to turn this auto-commenting off completely on the Canvas side? I will also follow up with Delta Math, because it should only be passing back the grades once, at the actual due time.

[chriscas]

Hi @KClarkson16,

I am 99% sure those comments are being inserted by Delta Math itself.  While we don't use Delta Math at my institution, we have plenty of other integrations that do grade passback, and I haven't seen any comments like that from any of them.  Please do come back and let us know what you hear from Delta Math about this.

-Chris

[dbrace]

In my experience, like @chriscas said, the grade passback usually identifies the name of the tool or the name of the instructor because the tool is (behind-the-scenes) acting on behalf of the teacher.

@KClarkson16, have you heard anything back? Is there anything else you would like help with?

-Doug

[KClarkson16]

Thanks for the replies @chriscas and @dbrace . I followed up with Delta Math and they are unable to replicate what is happening to me and think it's a Canvas setting on my individual or institutional end.

Parts of my prior communication to Delta Math:

"Having the continuous automatic grade passback, even after a student has earned a 100% by the due date, is the problem. It updates the grade on the assignment in Canvas, and when it posts the new grade, it is marked as late because that is after the due date. It is not marking down their score, it is flagging it as late. [...] it is because [...] the grade passback continues [from Delta Math], even after the student has earned a 100% on the assignment."

"The major problem is not a student completing an assignment after the due date, it is a student doing optional practice within an assignment's topic after they had already completed it for full credit by the due date. This is not solved by the manual passback strategy. I have students doing optional practice for a unit test on assignments from weeks ago that they had already completed and were assigned full credit for on the due date. Doing manual passback once everyone had completed the assignment would not solve this issue. It would also flag all the assignments as late because the scores are being imported from Delta to Canvas after the due date (which is what Canvas counts as the submission time)."

Responses from Delta Math:

"the piece that we are unable to recreate is the assignment being marked as late. For the screenshot below, the due date was in the morning on 10/29. However, work done later in the day or even this morning that was passed back is not being marked as late on the teacher or student end."

"After taking a look at Canvas' documentation, the best path forward may be for you to manually mark these students from "late" to "none" if they wanted additional practice after the assignment's due date. You could also play around with the due dates within Canvas if needed. The grade calculation will always pull from the due date listed on the DeltaMath portion of the assignment, so the dates do not have to match."

Where this leaves me:

As I have been doing, I am going to have to pay attention to which students have earned full credit on a Delta Math assignment and monitor Canvas to see if anyone is marked late after the fact. Then I will have to go back in and manually change their notation from "Late" to "None." This is tedious and frustrating.

Any thoughts?

[dbrace]

Hi @KClarkson16,

Thanks for getting back to us about this.

I do not know what @chriscas thinks but, based on what you have shared with us, I understand why this is happening from a DeltaMath perspective and I understand why this is happening from a Canvas LMS perspective.

I do not believe that there is anything that we (as members of the Instructure/Canvas Community) can suggest or say/do to work around the situation.

-Doug