Late Penalty

[JalisaKale]

Currently several of our instructors have been encountering an issue when the 'Late Grading' policy button is toggled on. The system is automatically issuing deducted scores for unsubmitted assignments with a future due date. Is there anyone else experiencing this issue? I teach a section of virtual science and noticed the same thing occurred with my gradebook as well. 

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

I haven't seen this behavior (but our classes have not started yet...

This isn't expected behavior.

if you haven't yet contacted Canvas Support it's worth doing so:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/How-do-I-contact-Canvas-Support/ta-p/389767

[James · Accepted solution]

@JalisaKale 

Several faculty at our school are seeing this with regards to Missing submissions, but the issue is related and due to the same underlying cause -- having due dates that were in the past.

I saw it in my class and I've been aware of the issue for several years and do the best I can to make sure it doesn't happen before I publish my course. This semester it still bit me on one assignment, my wife had it happen for a several assignments, and another faculty had it happen for three quizzes. My experience has been that it happens when you publish a course that has dates in the past and you have a Late or Missing policy. That policy gets applied to those assignments because they were in the due in the past -- even though they weren't by the time students could take them.

The quick way to fix it with missing submissions -- assuming there are no student submissions -- to go the gradebook and set the default grade for those assignments to blank. You will need to overwrite existing grades for this to work, which is why it's important to make students haven't submitted yet. You can also press the delete key to remove any bad grades, but you'll have to do that one at a time.

Our Canvas Admin filed a ticket with Canvas support and got a typical -- incorrect, vague, or misleading -- response from them. This is from Level 1 support on August 21, 2024.

I am sorry to hear you are having issues with assignments being graded with a 0. This usually happens when the course content is copied to a new course and the missing submission policy kicks in giving the score. The assignment that are copied from a past course include old due dates so when Canvas sees these old dates the missing submission policy kicks in before anyone can change the due dates. You can avoid this by disabling the missing submission policy and then copying the content to the new course shell. I hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any questions.

The first part of that is mostly correct and matches with what I've seen. It's the suggestion on how to avoid that is incorrect.

You see, the brand new course shell doesn't have any late or missing policies for us. Those settings get copied when the course content is copied. In other words, there is no way for us to disable the missing submission policy before copying the course over. That would involve going into the previous course -- which may already be ended and you cannot edit anything -- course and changing the policy there. That has the potential to affect the grades of students in that course.

It is more likely to happen if you don't change the dates and move them over with the dates from the previous term. If you tell Canvas to change the dates when copying content, it should fix things, but I'm not sure that's 100% certain. If you strip the dates completely, it should fix it, but that is not optimal either.

I do not know if deleting the grade will fix the late submission. I do know that changing the late policy doesn't affect already-graded assignments. You may need to go through and remove the late status from the gradebook for each of those assignments.

It's really something Canvas needs to fix rather than putting it off as a user mistake.

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

I haven't seen this behavior (but our classes have not started yet...

This isn't expected behavior.

if you haven't yet contacted Canvas Support it's worth doing so:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/How-do-I-contact-Canvas-Support/ta-p/389767

[James · Accepted solution]

@JalisaKale 

Several faculty at our school are seeing this with regards to Missing submissions, but the issue is related and due to the same underlying cause -- having due dates that were in the past.

I saw it in my class and I've been aware of the issue for several years and do the best I can to make sure it doesn't happen before I publish my course. This semester it still bit me on one assignment, my wife had it happen for a several assignments, and another faculty had it happen for three quizzes. My experience has been that it happens when you publish a course that has dates in the past and you have a Late or Missing policy. That policy gets applied to those assignments because they were in the due in the past -- even though they weren't by the time students could take them.

The quick way to fix it with missing submissions -- assuming there are no student submissions -- to go the gradebook and set the default grade for those assignments to blank. You will need to overwrite existing grades for this to work, which is why it's important to make students haven't submitted yet. You can also press the delete key to remove any bad grades, but you'll have to do that one at a time.

Our Canvas Admin filed a ticket with Canvas support and got a typical -- incorrect, vague, or misleading -- response from them. This is from Level 1 support on August 21, 2024.

I am sorry to hear you are having issues with assignments being graded with a 0. This usually happens when the course content is copied to a new course and the missing submission policy kicks in giving the score. The assignment that are copied from a past course include old due dates so when Canvas sees these old dates the missing submission policy kicks in before anyone can change the due dates. You can avoid this by disabling the missing submission policy and then copying the content to the new course shell. I hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any questions.

The first part of that is mostly correct and matches with what I've seen. It's the suggestion on how to avoid that is incorrect.

You see, the brand new course shell doesn't have any late or missing policies for us. Those settings get copied when the course content is copied. In other words, there is no way for us to disable the missing submission policy before copying the course over. That would involve going into the previous course -- which may already be ended and you cannot edit anything -- course and changing the policy there. That has the potential to affect the grades of students in that course.

It is more likely to happen if you don't change the dates and move them over with the dates from the previous term. If you tell Canvas to change the dates when copying content, it should fix things, but I'm not sure that's 100% certain. If you strip the dates completely, it should fix it, but that is not optimal either.

I do not know if deleting the grade will fix the late submission. I do know that changing the late policy doesn't affect already-graded assignments. You may need to go through and remove the late status from the gradebook for each of those assignments.

It's really something Canvas needs to fix rather than putting it off as a user mistake.

[Mike_F · Accepted solution]

We started our fall classes last week (8/26) and had widespread reports of this as well. Instructure knows it's an issue and has it listed on their Known Issues page, but have otherwise been silent on a resolution, workaround, or updates in general. We're asking everyone who is having the issue at our institution to submit a ticket to hopefully get them looking at it seriously, or at least just give us updates.