Why is grade override letter grades calculated diffrent than letter grades for assignments?

[jorgen_ivarsson]

Does anybody know the reason why letter grades are calculated different when using grade override than if you just grade assignments? I think this behavior is very confusing for our teachers, and can couse some unintended results if the teacher is not observent of what is shown in the student view of Grades. The teacher can see a A++ in the column for grade override, but the student will see the result as 94 % ( The letter grade are stragly enough shown someware up to the right on the students grades page). If the theacher puts A++ in an assignment column, the student will get 100%.

I wish that the letter grade-to-persentage calculation would be consistent across gradebook. It would be easyier to explain to the teachers and students. In practise this means that the teacher must remeber to put in percentage in the override column and not letter grades, since the two actions will get diffrent results.

From the teacher guides:
"When a final grade override is entered as a letter grade, the percentage score for the assignment is the lower limit of the range assigned to that letter grade in the grading scheme."

From the release notes:
"For an override score, a letter grade results in the lower value of the grading scheme. This behavior varies from entering letter grades for individual assignments, where entries take the higher value of the grading scheme. "

[JeffW]

Hello @jorgen_ivarsson 

That is a very good question! I asked and looked around but I was not able to find an answer for that. I would recommend reaching out to Canvas Support for more information.

[JeffW · Accepted solution]

@jorgen_ivarsson 

I ended up getting more information from the Instructure product team! I wanted to share what they said and confirm that this design is intentional.

• When using grading schemes in a course, if an instructor enters a letter grade for an assignment, the percentage score records the upper bound of the percentage interval.
• When using grading schemes in a course, if an instructor enters a letter grade as a final grade override, the percentage score is recorded as the lower bound of the percentage interval given that instructors typically bump the grade by the smallest amount needed to move the student up a grade.
• If an instructor wishes to provide a specific percentage score/grade, they should enter it as a percentage, not the letter grade.

[jonivn86]

Thank you very much Jeff for reaching out to the developers to get a motivation for the decision to calculate the percentage differently in Grade override than for Assignments in Gradebook!

Although the behavior is described in the guides and release notes, it does not say why the calculation of percentages is done in a different way for grade override than for assignments. So thanks again!

Even if I understand the assumption presented as a motive for calculating the percentage based on a specific letter grade, I think in this case that consistency is more important than what is merely an assumption. I would say that this assumption breaks the logic in the letter grade-to-percentage transformation. It forces teachers to remember different rules  for the same process just motivated by which view they are in.

An easy solution would be to change how Canvas calculate letter grades to percentage so that it does this consequently though out all contexts in Canvas (using the transformation that is used in assignments - maximizing the percentage for a grade), and then say to teachers: If you just want bump up the grade by the smallest amount, you should enter it as a percentage, not the letter grade.

So just to summarize the over all principle: Consistency over assumptions.