Dropping lowest set of assignments

[ChristynaMoore]

Hi, I'm in charge of the lab portion of an intro level class this semester. I'm also completely new to using canvas as an instructor, beyond just grading in the past. Here's my problem: each week for lab, the students have to complete 3 separate assignments: a pre-lab, a quiz, and their lab activity. The course policy is that they can drop their lowest lab score, including all three of the associated assignments for whichever week they score the lowest total in, but I can't figure out a way to do this without first manually entering the combined score from all three assignments into a psuedo "lab total" assignment, in a separate assignment group that actually counts for the final grade. Is there a way to link these assignments so they all get dropped together without doing all that extra work?

[James · Accepted solution]

@ChristynaMoore 

Interesting use case. Canvas isn't really designed for interesting cases. They target the middle 60% of users.

The short answer is no, there is no way to link them automatically to get everything you want.

You can export the grades to Excel, do the calculations for the composite pseudo-assignments there, and upload them back. If you (or someone you know) has programming skills, you can download the grades, have the program compute the grades, and then submit them back to Canvas.

It can be done without manually entering the grades, but there is no built-in way in Canvas to tie assignments together like you're wanting.