Quiz has fictitious, fractional scores

[arencambre]

My midterm quizzes have fractional scores even though that is impossible. My quiz has 31 possible points, and there is no way for a student to get a fraction of a point. Despite this, all the grades have decimals to the hundredths, and they do not correspond to the actual grade.

For example, a student who got 28 points on the quiz has a recorded gradebook score of 26.19. Huh?

I never curved the grades using the option in the dropdown in the gradebook. I am unaware of choosing an option that permits some score other than the actual score to appear in the gradebook.

What is the best way to fix this, and how do I prevent Canvas from messing up grades in the future?

[SusanNiemeyer]

Can you post a screenshot of how you set up your quiz?

[arencambre]

Thank you. Here are the two settings screens:

[Ron_Bowman]

@arencambre -

you posted while I was writing my previous response.  So you are using New quizzes with an external tool it looks like for the quiz.  The only thing I can quess is that the score being returned by the external tool is what is causing the problem.  Score information may help with figuring out what is going on.

[arencambre]

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@Ron_Bowman wrote:

@arencambre -

you posted while I was writing my previous response.  So you are using New quizzes with an external tool it looks like for the quiz.  The only thing I can quess is that the score being returned by the external tool is what is causing the problem.  Score information may help with figuring out what is going on.

---

Thank you. The external tool is merely Lockdown Browser. That doesn't grade quizzes as far as I know?

Answering a couple of questions in your earlier post:

• This is a new quiz.
• I added up the point values on all questions and got 31, which is the number of points assigned to the quiz.
• I expect that when a student scores 28 points, that I see 28 points in the gradebook. 26.19 is a fictitious point value that is impossible for any student to get. I do not expect to see fictitious point values in the gradebook.

[Ron_Bowman]

@arencambre -

Okay.  Thanks for the information.  You are correct, that if the quiz questions all add up to 28 out of 31 you would expect to see 28 in the gradebook not 26.19.  You have the score showing as points, so that should not be an issue either.  

Without actually looking at the quizzes and the gradebook (this definitely seems like one of those cases where a subtle detail is being overlooked), I am afraid that I am out of suggestions.

[arencambre]

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@Ron_Bowman wrote:

@arencambre -

Okay.  Thanks for the information.  You are correct, that if the quiz questions all add up to 28 out of 31 you would expect to see 28 in the gradebook not 26.19.  You have the score showing as points, so that should not be an issue either.  

Without actually looking at the quizzes and the gradebook (this definitely seems like one of those cases where a subtle detail is being overlooked), I am afraid that I am out of suggestions.

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Thank you. I am getting my on-campus Canvas expert to look at this, too. It would be hard for me to believe this isn't a bug. Even if somehow, somewhere, I configured something that would cause this, the UX shouldn't hide that fact from me.

[Ron_Bowman]

@arencambre  I agree with @SusanNiemeyer .  Can you provide more information about the quiz - the assignment group(possibly) and 2 or 3 of the actual results that you are seeing.  My first thought was that the autograde on the quiz was giving you the fractional points.  from your post it sounds like a student has a 28/31 and therefore you would expect to see 28.  Or, did you make the quiz worth more points (or less I guess) than the actual questions will provide - if you are using New quizzes.  Which reminded me which version of Quizzes are you using?  New Quiz or Classic Quiz?

[nwilson7]

@arencambre While you setup the quiz to be worth 31 points, when you created the questions, do those points also add up to 31?  With new quizzes, these two can differ (meaning I could set a quiz to be worth 31 points but then the questions only add up to 28) and Canvas will do the math behind the scenes to give proportional points, which many times will work out to decimals.  Also, did you do any questions with multiple answers?  This question type will award fractions of points for correct answers and removes fractions of points for incorrect, which will many times result in decimals as well.

Just a few thoughts!

-Nick

[arencambre]

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@nwilson7 wrote:

@arencambre While you setup the quiz to be worth 31 points, when you created the questions, do those points also add up to 31?  With new quizzes, these two can differ (meaning I could set a quiz to be worth 31 points but then the questions only add up to 28) and Canvas will do the math behind the scenes to give proportional points, which many times will work out to decimals.  Also, did you do any questions with multiple answers?  This question type will award fractions of points for correct answers and removes fractions of points for incorrect, which will many times result in decimals as well.

Just a few thoughts!

-Nick

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Thank you, Nick. Answers:

• Yes, if you add up the point values for all questions, they add up to 31. One question is 8 points, and the remaining questions are 1 point each.
• On fractional-point questions, I am not aware of any that are that way, and it may not be relevant: I have a student where, when I view the student's actual quiz responses, Canvas indicates 28 points earned. However, the score it put in the gradebook is 26.19. The conversion to fictitious, fractional numbers appears to happen after the score is determined.

[arencambre · Accepted solution]

We may have figured it out.

This is a new quiz, and it was imported from an old quiz from a prior course. The old quiz had 29 points. Even though the new quiz had 31 points, and it was set that way before it was published (see the above screenshot), it still clung to the 29 point scale. This basically meant the highest possible grade was 29/31 (93.5%), and the grade went down from there.

Our campus Canvas expert was able to reset the quiz's grading so that it reflects a 31 point scale. Her suspicion is that some buggy behavior happened in the old > new import. She thinks that the next time I copy the quiz's contents, since I'll be going from new > new, it will not be an issue.

[Ron_Bowman]

@arencambre -

Thanks for posting the solution to the issue you were having. 

I have seen other posts (not really read them) about issues with importing quizzes into New Quizzes.  

Glad you were able to track down the issue - I guess I was somewhat correct in stating that there was something we were missing - although it had nothing to do with the settings.  I will keep this information in mind if I convert my classic quizzes to New quizzes.

[Jennifer_Mayes]

After adjusting the quizzes total score, one needed to add and remove a fudge point at the bottom of the test and then the student score can be updated. 

[jc71]

I ended up with the same things, but it was from a different cause. I created a new quiz (import a .qti file) that had 34 questions, each worth 1 point.  Students took it, and then, through the regrading process, I changed the point value of 2 of the questions to be worth only 0.5 points each, so the total test grade should have been worth.  I now understand that the decimal grades (e.g., 25.76) that got reported were scaling the score out of 33 to be out of the original 34 points since the point values don't automatically update for the whole test when you change questions (a warning would have been really nice here!).

However, having figured that out, I then changed the point value for the entire quiz back to 33.  As shown below, speedgrader (and the exported data file) correctly recognize that the points earned was 25 out of 33 points.  The grade box now recognizes that the grade is out of 33 points.  However, it still has the decimal grade (25.76 = 25/33 scaled to be out of 34).  Canvas didn't scale it back down after I fixed the total number of points on the quiz.

I tried regrading another question, without actually changing anything, but that did not change the decimal.  I tried adding 0.0 as fudge points, but that didn't do anything.  What worked was to add 0.0001 as fudge points to every student's grade.

It seems like Canvas should have gone from a test originally worth 34 points, to the changed point values for 2 questions and thus the 25/33 on the quiz (which was still 25.76/34 in the gradebook), and then, when the total points on the test went back to 33, to scale the test score back to being out of 33. This seems especially true because it recognizes (as seen in the screenshot), the points earned and points possible.  It even has that as the final score at the bottom of the page.

EDIT: It turns out that it fixed it eventually! While I had given it 10-15 minutes and re-loading to update, it turns out it just needed much longer. By the time I'd finished searching for help and typing this, it re-scored them.  I'm leaving the comment here for other folks to see this and know that it is fixable without going through tests one-by-one.