Quiz exemptions by section in a merged Canvas site

[jnknumich]

Hi everyone -

I have a question about how to best apply Canvas quiz exemptions to a large subset of students enrolled in a merged Canvas course.

Context

I help coordinate a large enrollment, multi-lecture course. We've merged all lecture sections into a single Canvas course site, with ~1700 students.

As part of the course, students are offered weekly pre-work assignments leading up to class meetings. These pre-work assignments are administered via Canvas quizzes.

Students are given an option regarding whether scores on these quizzes contribute to their overall course grade. If they opt-in to this option, their exams are weighted less heavily. If they opt-out, exams are weighted more heavily.

My question

Ideally, we'd like to be able to assign these Canvas quizzes to all students in the course and then, after the deadline passes, exempt the quiz for students in the 'opt-out' section. To my knowledge, no such functionality exists. As a work around, we've been assigning the quizzes to both sections of students and then unassigning the quiz for the 'opt-out' section after the deadline has passed. This has two drawbacks: first, students in the 'opt-out' section can no longer see the quizzes/their solutions after it has been unassigned and many have expressed interest in using them as extra ungraded practice. More seriously, 'opt-out' students who did complete the quiz have their submissions deleted.

Is there an exempt-by-section functionality that I'm missing or a way of achieving the intended result that is better than the workaround described above?

Any help/insight is appreciated.

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hi @jnknumich ,

There may be a better way to do this, but one thing that occurs to me is to use a non-weighted Assignment Group to achieve this goal. All quizzes could be placed in this AG, which would be set to 0%. A separate Assignment (not a Quiz) would be created in the appropriate weighted Assignment Group, but it would be just a placeholder set to No Submission. 

Assign the placeholder assignments only to the "Quizzes Count" section, and manually transfer the grades from the Quizzes to the placeholder Assignments. (If students are allowed to select quiz-by-quiz whether to count each quiz, you would instead have to excuse those students who opted out of that quiz.)

The actual quizzes would remain visible to everyone but would not actually count toward the grade (based on the 0% weight). All grade calculations would be based on the placeholder assignments, which really would just be holding the points.

[jnknumich]

Thanks @TrishaMeyer1! We will definitely give this a try and see how it goes. (We'll plan to keep the placeholder as a hidden item so as not to confuse students.)