Stop the ability to delete Submission Points when students have submitted

[LenkaJulia]

Hi Instructure Community,

We encountered a concerning situation yesterday - an instructor accidently deleted a submission point after submissions had been made and marked, this particular assignment did not show up on 'Undelete'. We were fortunate that when we contacted Canvas support (thank you Evelina you super star) and they (in the backend where magic happens) were able to restore the deleted assignments, marks, comments and all (in less than 30 minutes).

However, I was wondering WHY is it even possible to delete an assignment submission point with submissions, when you cannot unpublish an assignment with submissions, and you cannot delete a student's submission when they upload an incorrect 'paper', so it feels like a bug to me.

Has anyone else encountered this?

[greydon]

Hello @LenkaJulia 

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with deleting assignments. Canvas does try to limit the amount of issues that can arise with features like you had mentioned. There is also the quick fix of using /undelete when teachers accidentally delete items as we understand it happens and when you restore one from /undelete it should bring back all grades  and  submissions. It sounds more like the teacher had overwritten the grades with an import or copy which unfortunately does happen and we need to use the beta instance to restore things that are overwritten. While we understand not wanting anyone to be able to delete assignments with grades - there are many instances where this is actually a fix to a bigger problem i.e. an overwrite. For example, a teacher gave students the wrong quiz and some students started taking it. Instead of just making the teacher regrade student by student or regrade question by question - it is much easier to duplicate or get the proper assignment in order and then delete the one with grades. The teacher can manually input the grades and even excuse the student using the "assign to" box so students don't have to retake quizzes or assignments. There are other situations like overwriting inadvertently - yes the teacher could go through the trouble of giving everyone different grades, making the assignment worth 0, etc. but in many  cases it is simply easier  to remove the 'wrong' assignment. There are other reasons also for keeping the feature but that is to just name a few. If you really don't want teachers to be able to delete assignments, as an admin you could remove that permission from teachers where they still create them but cannot delete. An admin would then come into the situation and determine if the assignment  warranted deleting. I know this isn't the answer you are looking for  but hopefully it provides some useful information.