Sept Due Date Quizzes Automatically Being Graded

[JordanGarciaNAU]

Good afternoon,

Our first day of class began today, and we're having some strange bugs popping up. The latest one is something I can't seem to solve.

A faculty member has some quizzes in their course, which are already published. Bizarrely, 2 of them have already dolled out a score of zeroes to these students, despite the due date not being listed until September (he does have the automatically give a zero if turned in after deadline). It's not for every student, either.

Any suggestions on how to go about figuring out this issue? Thank you very much

[AdamB4]

Posting here because I experienced a similar issue this morning. I imported a module (containing a quiz) from a summer term section and adjusted the quiz settings, including the dates, as I normally would. Every student was automatically assigned a zero, although their attempts were still open and the quiz able to be attempted. The zeros were counting towards their grades, too, so it was not just a visual bug.

I do have a missing assignment gradebook policy set; however, Canvas automatically assigning zeros has never once occurred from import/course copy of an assignment/quiz. I've done this a hundred times prior between various sections of different courses.

[clpatter · Accepted solution]

I've had four of our instructors contact us in the past 2 days with the same issue. I wondered if maybe they imported the content into a published course, and that's why it was happening, so I did some testing.

I have a FA23 course that's set up to automatically give zeros if assignments are missing. I imported that content into an Unpublished course, and some of the items were automatically given zeros.

I read the page on applying a missing submission policy, and it says it won't apply to unpublished assignments, but doesn't mention anything about an unpublished course.  When you're importing from a previous course, all of those assignments/etc are published, and you can't unpublish anything that has student submissions, so it's not even possible to unpublish them.  And, as others here have mentioned, we've never seen this issue in the past, so it seems like something new.

For anyone that has had this happen, the easy way to get back the dashes back in the gradebook (no grade) are to:

1. Go to "Grades" in the course.
2. Hover over the title of an item with zeros and click the 3-dots icon.
3. Click on "Set Default Grade."
4. Leave the box empty, but check the box to "Overwrite already-entered grades."  (Obviously, don't do this if you have entered any scores yourself).
5. Click the "Set Default Grade" button.

That seems to get rid of the zero and change the grades back to a dash.

[JordanGarciaNAU]

@clpatter 

Thank you for that sort of fix, a colleague of mine made a similar assumption to yours: that they did a course copy with old dates, but the apply zero to late submissions option was already toggled on. That makes sense I think?

[AdamB4]

This is the gist of what's occurring; however, I have imported assignments from various past sections (with past due dates) into new sections with no affect on the gradebook. Additionally, all of my courses have always had a missing grade policy to apply 0s to missing submissions. Nonetheless, this has never affected any previous section's imports from an older section until this semester. Something has changed on Canvas' end. Our Canvas specialist has noted that she has received similar inquiries from other faculty.