Setting Quiz Dates

[DavidUnger]

I am having trouble understanding the Canvas grading protocol on Quizzes. Here's an example scenario:

The Available From date is Jan 1. The Due Date is Jan 8. The Show Correct Answers is set to Jan 9. 

They are allowed Multiple Attempts and Quiz Score to Keep is Highest.

My intention is that a student who submits on or before Jan 8 would get full credit for their submission. My intention is that a student who submits on or after Jan 9 (when correct answers are available) would get to view and possibly even take the quiz, but would get no credit for it because the due date has passed.

If a student score 50% on a submission before the Jan 8 deadline then tries again after Jan 9 seeing the correct answers and get 100%, what score is recorded in the Gradebook?

After reading a few other community posts, my impression is that this may not be what actually happens. That perhaps a student submitting after the deadline would still get full credit.

[Gabriel33 · Accepted solution]

Unless you set up a late submission penalty, a student's submissions before or after the due date are treated equally.
If that penalty worked as a reasonable person (I) would expect, what you'd want is to set a late penalty of 100%, so that any submissions after the due date would be ignored.

However, Instructure has decided that a late penalty should be applied to all submissions (in Classic Quiz with multiple attempts), not just the late ones (see the second to last bullet point in the link I shared).
So if you set up a 100% late penalty, a student gets 80/100 on Jan 7, and then tries again on Jan 10 and gets 100/100 (or 20/100, doesn't matter), the late penalty will apply, meaning the student will have 0/100 in the end.
If you check the last bullet point, Instructure very wisely avoided this issue in New Quizzes by disallowing multiple attempts when there's a late penalty.

So to keep allowing multiple attempts and not giving 0 to students who tried both before and after the solutions are posted, here are a couple of suggestions, assuming you are using Classic Quizzes:

• Set up an available until date that is equal to the due date, which will stop students from being able to submit an assignment after the due date
  The main issue here is that students will not be able to submit practice attempts after the due date, which may be fine for students who already submitted it earlier, but it means that students will not be able to see the quiz if they didn't do it before. I solve that problem by having a 100% late penalty and changing the available until dates (but not due date) for the students that don't have a submission (I use the API to do that more or less automatically)
  
  
• Manually check the student's submissions to assign them a 0 if they are after the due date (or use the API and a script to make those changes)

Note also that the available until date should automatically submit any open quizzes at that date, but if a student closed their browser, it may only apply after they open Canvas again (marking it as late, even if they didn't really do anything on the quiz).

[DavidUnger]

Thank you for the thorough and informative answer. I also appreciate your posting of two potential solutions to still get the desired experience, i.e., regardless of on-time submissions, all students have the opportunity to try the quizzes again as practice but cannot earn points from those attempts. I have no experience using API in Canvas. Do you have links to either of the two bulleted suggestions you offered?

Thanks again, @gab .

[Gabriel33]

The main API documentation is in Canvas LMS REST API Documentation.

I generally use the Python canvasapi module, do you have experience using APIs in Python?

Basically what the code needs to do for the first suggestion is to (after connecting to the Canvas course):

• List quizzes in the course
• Loop through quizzes, focusing on those with a due date in the past
• Get the assignment ID of the quiz (quizzes are assignments)
• Get all submissions for that assignment ID, focusing on those that are missing or have no score
• Add an assignment override to the user ids of the missing submissions that extends the available until date but keeps the original due date

For the second suggestion, it should start similarly, until you get all submissions, but then just compare the submission date with the due date, and set the submission grade to 0 if it's late.

[DavidUnger]

I do not have experience using APIs in Python, but it seems I now have a reason to learn it.

Thanks again!