How Do I ACTUALLY Excuse an Absence?

[graeme]

Students frequently ask for an absence to be excused (for medical reasons, and so on). It seems that in Canvas, excusing an absence only means that a direct penalty won't be applied. I don't have "Grade Settings" set to deduct percentage points for absences, so excusing an absence has no effect on the student's grade at all. But the absence hasn't really been excused if the student's grade is the same as it would have been if it wasn't excused.

The point of excusing an absence is to not have that absence count against the student at all.

The only way I can see to actually excuse an absence is to mark the student "present," even though they weren't, which makes record keeping a farce.

[greydon]

Hello @graeme

There are a couple ways you can excuse a student from an assignment, but the easiest by far is to give them an "excused" status within the gradebook. Locate the assignment in the gradebook and then the student - looking at their cell or grade box - click on it and click the arrow pointing right. Excuse the student and this assignment will neither count for or against the student's final grade. Here is the Canvas guide:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-change-the-status-of-a-submission-in-th...

[graeme]

Thanks. But the question isn't about assignments.

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @graeme

Thanks for posting this in the Canvas Community!

You are correct in that there is not a straightforward way to indicate when an absence is excused, for some reason.

I have seen that instructors will typically mark a student as present and create a badge that can be used to mark an excused Absence. A badge functions like a marker to indicate something about the student’s participation in the course that day. The other way I have seen some instructors do this is to mark the student as Absent and use a badge to indicate if it was excused. They would then manually update the grade of the student from the gradebook.

The Canvas Guide HERE lists that To unmark the attendance status, leave the button as the default (gray no symbol icon). The unmarked attendance status also indicates an excused absence.

I did see than an idea was submitted HERE about an overhaul of the attendance tool that has seemed to pick up a lot of attention from community members.

Hopefully this helps!

-Colton

[graeme]

Thanks for that!

Badges don't seem to be an option at my institution; the attendance page doesn't have the "roll call" format shown in that link. (This inconsistency is annoying, but that's another issue.)

The situation has become a bit weirder now, because when I went back to look at these excused absences again, the student's overall grade had, in fact, changed, despite Canvas Help having confirmed for me that it doesn't work that way. After a bit of experimenting (which was difficult, because Canvas doesn't provide the "test student" option with attendance - but that's another issue), I found that it takes 5-10 minutes for the grade to update after a change is made in Attendance. (This is also annoying, as you sometimes need to experiment with the factors affecting a student's grade, and it's not practical to wait 10 minutes each time you change something - but that's also another issue.) As it stands, I think the system may be working the way I want. I just wish it were all a bit more self-explanatory; it would be great if hovering over an option told you exactly what it does, instead of leaving you to guess, Google it, have confusing and misleading conversations with Canvas Help, and plead for guidance from the Canvas community. But that's also another issue.

[KipHaggerty]

Currently, you have to mark it "Unmarked" and make a badge "Excused." Technically it still impacts the student by removing it from the total number of classes considered for the Attendance grade. It seems to be a reasonable compromise grade-wise, though it is cumbersome to administer. You have to add the excused badge to every new Canvas course.