Optional Homework Grading Scheme

[CollinFelter]

My course design involves optional homework that students can do to improve their grade. Not only does it seem that optional grades are not well integrated into Canvas, but my equation for grade impact is seemingly impossible to input. It works as follows:

((Sum of percentages on homework assignments ÷ number of assignments submitted) - course grade)) x
.5 + course grade = new grade with assignment boost

Example: If a student has a 64% in the course and turns in 5 assignments with scores (80%, 80%, 75%,
100%, 95%) they would average those assignment scores by adding the percentages and dividing by the
number of assignments turned in (5 in this case) to come up with 86%. Their homework average (86%)
minus their course grade (64%) gives 22 this multiplied by .5 gives 11 added onto their course grade (64%)
provides a final grade of 75%

This allows for homework to only be beneficial, avoids busy work for students who already have control of the material, and avoids insurmountable 0s in the gradebook due to missed assignments. Finding some way to incorporate this into the gradebook of Canvas would be incredibly helpful. For now I have create a 0% weighted assignment category and grade the assignments accordingly (this allows students to receive feedback and catalog their scores), and I then just provide them an updated homework score impact on their exams. I will then manually adjust the grades at the end of the quarter to reflect the appropriate homework boost. 

Any thoughts are welcome!

[James]

@CollinFelter 

You are correct that Canvas does not support this directly.

This sounds like something I would have done 30 years ago but with test corrections as opposed to homework. Back then, I wasn't using an LMS and my grades were in a spreadsheet so it was easy for me to create custom formulas and rules. Canvas was my first LMS (started in 2012) and I kind of learned to do things the way they supported because their gradebook is what I was using instead of my own. I'll admit that I'm a bit jaded after my last semester where students did really well on homework and didn't know anything in class because they weren't actually doing the homework themselves, but it sounds like you're being really generous for unsupervised work. Regardless, that doesn't affect how to implement this in Canvas.

What you want can be implemented in a few ways.

Do you add homework in after each test? That is, your scenario applies to exam 1 but then a different situation applies to exam 2? If so, then the 0% weighted category and manually adjusting the exam scores works reasonably well.

If you didn't have any rules for dropping grades, I would do things slightly differently. I would create an extra assignment for each exam: exam 1 bonus, exam 2 bonus, etc. Make them worth 0 points and put them in the exam category. Add the extra credit there. That way you can see the original exam scores and the bonus separately. It also doesn't lull a student into thinking "I got 75% on the exam, I know this material." They see "I got 64% on the exam, but thankfully I did my homework and ended up with a 75%." It may not be the student who sees that, but the parent. And then the parent is on their kid's case about "Why did you get a 64% on the exam when you got 86% on the homework" and then they can have a conversation about how ineffective the homework is the way they're doing it.

Doing this per-exam allows you to stay on top of things and give the students a more current version of their final grade.

Dropping any of the exam scores changes things. In this case, I would put the original exam scores in a category worth 0% of the grade and then put the boosted exam score into the category that counts for the grade. If you drop grades but don't combine them into a single grade per exam, then Canvas would drop a bad test grade but keep the bonus points for it, giving the student an extra boost.

If the homework boost is applied once at the end of the term, then you could do something similar except only create one homework bonus assignment worth 0 points. I wouldn't adjust the actual exam scores, just have that extra assignment to get any bonus points.

If you drop an exam, then look at what the average was before the grade was dropped and then calculate the boost.

Whenever you do something that out of the ordinary, make sure you document and explain to the students what you're doing. They can usually figure things out as long as they know what you're doing and they don't usually complain as long as it's in their favor.