Hiding Assignment Groups in the Gradebook

[justinjoslin]

Our school recently switched from term courses in Canvas to year long courses. In a lot of ways, this was a great move. However, my gradebook is now cluttered with excessive empty assignment group total columns. This isn't an issue if you look all grades for all terms throughout the year, but no one does that. There is a filter option to display assignments from the current term, but this does not filter out assignment groups that are unused for that term. I do not use the exact same assignment groups each term, so by the spring I end up with 10-15 empty columns in my gradebook.

I know this question has been posted many times before. However, it's been two years since any posts have been made and it still seems like this is an issue. If this problem has been solved, please let me know. From my research here, though, it seems like it has not.

[SusanNiemeyer]

Alas, I don't think that you can hide the Assignment Group columns, but you could try moving them to the right.

I'm curious, though, why you have ended up with so many empty Assignment Groups. How are you creating Assignment Groups? Do you need so many of them for your weighted grading?

Basically, I set up my Assignment Groups this way:

• Weekly Homework  40%
• Weekly Quizzes  10%
• Exam 1    15%
• Exam 2   15%
• Final Exam   20%
• Extra   0%

Any miscellaneous assignment that I'm not planning to actually give (or grade) ends up in the Extra bucket, which is awarded 0%.

Maybe you could consolidate your Assignment Groups? 

[justinjoslin]

Years ago I moved to more of a mastery model in my grading. I went away from breaking work down into similar buckets (homework, quizzes, tests, etc) and started using unit categories instead. I try to only grade things that I believe are assessments, which allows me to very quickly see how students are doing with specific units. Therefore, each term is unique regarding assignment groups. The ones I used in the fall will not be used again in the winter.

I could use a model where I have generic names like Unit 1, Unit 2, etc for each term, but I like being able to name them what they actually are (Linear Motion, Newton's Laws, etc).

It's a small thing, and I know I'm in the minority, but Canvas already has a filter for hiding assignments from previous terms. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to have the same thing for group assignment columns.

[RobertMashburn]

I used to have the same problem, but I switched to a summative model recently and now all of my coursework is just grouped under the general "Assignments" assignments category.  I still separate all of my work under Modules.  

Sorry to hear that Assignment groups are still an issue.  I agree that they should be able to be created either by the year or by the quarter, and then weighed as needed from there.