How do I change the name of downloaded assignment file submissions?

[EmmaRitchie]

Hi there

I have an assignment that requires students to submit a word document. When I download all submissions as a zip file, Canvas adds a prefix to each word document file name. e.g. it will add "studenttest_127_10280". The issue we have with this is we need to keep files anonymous and have already asked students to name their document with a specific naming convention. Renaming all files will take a long time and is not possible to do with ant renamer as the number of characters differs for each file.

Does anyone know how to stop canvas adding on the prefix to the downloaded submissions when they are downloaded like this? (I noticed that when I download a submission one at a time via speedgrader that it won't add anything to the name, but this is time consuming). Also as an aside what is the relevance of the numbers that are added to name? The first 3 digit number is the Canvas ID but I am curious on what the second set of digits represents.

Thanks

Emma

[greydon · Accepted solution]

Hello @EmmaRitchie

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with downloading assignments. Thank you for your explanation - to be upfront, there is not a way to change the names of the file submissions when you download or bulk download. The students' file submissions will be uploaded as they have them titled from their devices. You can download them individually and that same title will display for you. However, when you bulk download all assignments, Canvas does alter them slightly to ensure that you do not mix up student submissions. I.e. "final exam" could be difficult to grade if you downloaded them for viewing and grading offline. Unfortunately, there is no feature or option to change this and bulk downloading will render them with their unique titles regardless of anonymous submissions or not - You would need to edit them manually.

[EmmaRitchie]

Thanks @greydon for your response, really appreciate it. It is helpful to know that it can't be changed at all.

[shermano]

Just rebooting this thread - but what if a computer programming course requires students to submit a file (e.g. .java).? Getting them all renamed would basically break all dependencies that require the filename to not be altered. Of course the workaround can be to simply rename/remove the prefixes, which may be manageable in a small class only.

[acollard]

That is EXACTLY the situation I regularly run into in my programming courses...

If I JUST need to view the .java source code - and SpeedGrader is cooperating - the code can be viewed there. BUT if the code needs to be compiled for testing all of the files need to be renamed after downloading.