Releases Q&A: 2022-01-15 Grading Missing Status Removal

[erinhmcmillan]

Looking to discuss this feature from the 2022-01-15 Release Notes? Post a reply and start a conversation!

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[degensp28]

Ooof, this really adds to the workload for instructors that want to enter 0's but still have the assignment marked as "Missing" for historical purposes. From my testing in Beta it seems that the instructor needs to update the dash to 0, move to the next grade, then come back and remark it as missing. I tried to keep it marked as missing in the right side panel (which is still adding work), but after the save the Missing radial was overwritten back to None.

Also during my testing, If using the "Set default grade" option, it is doing a weird thing where the color coding is matching up with Excused, but the pop out window shows Missing. I am hoping that "Set default grade" maintaining the Missing notation was intentional, but there is no mention of it in the release.

Can we get this moved to a course level setting that instructors can choose if they want this?

[cannaday_ra]

Will this work when teachers manually enter a grade into speedgrader or must they use the Canvas Gradebook?

Thanks!

[jsailor]

Hi, @cannaday_ra. This will work from either within the gradebook or SpeedGrader, so whichever workflow the instructor prefers. 

[chriscas]

@degensp28 , that's a good call out about 0 grades.  I do feel like this new feature should probably retain the missing tag if the grade entered is a 0, especially considering that marking things as a 0 is required for the gradebook to properly calculate a final grade.  It would be misleading for the missing tag to be removed so the final grade is calculated correctly, and faculty definitely don't want/need the extra work of re-applying the missing tag in that scenario!

-Chris

[degensp28]

@chriscas That might be an even easier fix than a course level setting, and I think preferable for most instructors. Good call.

[audra_agnelly]

I think it is great that the missing is dropped when a grade is recorded, but having it disappear when a 0 is entered is problematic. I also know that some teachers in our district use a minimum 50% policy, so that even a missing assignment would have a score >0. Many K12 schools have rethought the concepts of 0 (think rubric-based grading on a 1-4 scale) and may have missing work that still has a non-zero score. It would be nice to see this feature under the gradebook settings where teachers/institutions can configure a rule to strip missing if grade = > X%.   

[KristelVerbrug]

Will the assignment also disappear from the students taks list?

[CarlaD07]

Appreciate this update and looking forward to being able to remove the missing status when a teacher enters a grade.

Is it possible for the status to change from missing to late when the grade is entered instead of removing all statuses? Our teachers are looking forward to this change and not having to manually go in and remove the Missing status if the student completes the work offline. With the update as is, the teacher will still have to go in and manually add the Late status to the assignment. 

Thanks again for this update and that it will work with all submission types!

[CarlaD07]

I agree the 0 issue could be problematic. A lot of our teachers have the late work policy turned on and set to award 0 points for missing assignments. Testing in the beta environment, when an assignment become late and no submission had been made, the assignment status changed to missing but the late work policy did not get applied. The assignment statues changed to Missing but the grade for students with no submissions remained "Ungraded" instead of changing to 0.

Is this working as expected, meaning the late policy will no longer automatically apply the teacher's assigned grade to students who have not made a submission once the due date has passed? Or am I doing something incorrectly?

Based on reading the update, I would expect a grades awarded automatically by a late work policy to not trigger the Missing Status to be Removed. Students who do not make a submission by the due date would automatically be awarded 0 points and have their assignment flagged as "Missing". If a student completes the work offline and the teacher manually enters a grade in the gradebook, then I would expect the Missing Status to be Removed to kick in and automatically remove the missing flag. This would allow assignments that are never submitted to be awarded 0 points by the Late Policy and remain as missing. But also allow the missing status to be removed if the teacher manually enters a grade.

[audra_agnelly]

@CarlaD07 I just tested this and was seeing the issue you described: the course policy to award a 0 for missing assignments was not populating in the gradebook cells (the cells were colored red, but displayed the dash instead of the zero). This seems to be due to a lag of some sort, because those 0's did appear when I refreshed the gradebook screen a minute later, and the cells were still red. When I manually changed the 0's to a different value, the missing flag was automatically removed. 

Beta can be slow, I don't know if we'd see this lag in production or not, but most teachers are not opening their gradebooks the second an assignment is due to see who has not turned it in. 

[CarlaD07]

@audra_agnelly  Thank you! That helps. I went back in and found this to work. Appreciate the additional info.

[snugent]

I have to agree with what everyone is saying about the missing policy applied in the gradebook. it doesn't work. This is added workload for instructors! Please fix this before this comes to production!

[katieb1]

Please please fix the zero thing! I started grading this morning and freaked out that my missings were going away when assigning students zeroes. I let students make up "Missing" assignments and tell them to look for the labels. This has increased my workload considerably, as now I have to manually change every "zero" back to missing. 

[audra_agnelly]

@erinhmcmillan has there been any review of the feedback here? I completely missed the fact that this is retroactive and now students with manually entered 0's have no missing flags on their Canvas assignments and teachers are not able to see a summary of who missing what now that the color-coding is gone from their gradebooks. Our quarter ends this week and teachers are flipping out:

"Not sure if this is an issue for anyone else, but it seems that a recent update has been made to change the way the ‘Missing’ flag on assignments in the grade book works.  Now, if a grade is put in, the ‘Missing’ is automatically turned off – even if there is no submission from the student!  This seems to be a retro-active update and it went back and turned off all my missing flags for anything that I have put in either a 0 or partial credit (based on equitable grading practices).

I verified the student grade report as well, and for one student who hasn’t turned in assignments since November, it is only showing 4 missing assignments (the four from last week that have not been graded).  It looks like he/she/they are not doing the work correctly, versus the reality that they are not submitting assignments at all."

"This makes my grading life miserable if I must update the missing flag each time I put in a score (either 0 or 50%) for stuff not turned in on time.

 I tell students all the time to look at their grades for ‘Missing’ assignments – and can’t leave these as ‘ungraded’ as then it doesn’t give the correct picture of their real grade and progress….."

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, we have an active use case the team is working on. Please reference  [OPEN] 'Apply missing ungraded as zeroes' feature ... - Instructure Community

Thanks,

Erin

[clark_youmans]

The problem with the work around is that it creates much more work for the teacher.  Work arounds that create more work are not helpful, especially when the system was working.

[jsailor]

Hi, @clark_youmans, can you help me to understand the work around that you are referencing so that I can better understand what is creating more work for the teacher? This change should actually alleviate work that the teacher has previously been required to do in order to remove missing labels when appropriate. As for when the missing labels should not be removed but a score given (whether zero or something else), using the late/missing policy will automatically complete this for the teacher as soon as a due date has passed OR the teacher can set the default grade from the assignment header to add the scores to all missing for that assignment at once without overwriting already-entered grades unless the box is checked to do so.  After discussing this with many users to understand pain points and typical workflows, we intentionally do not remove the missing label when the default grade is set for an assignment as many teachers use this feature to go back at the end of the week/month/grading period, to update scores for missing, but also want them to still show as missing. 

[clark_youmans]

I had been informed and, judging from the above thread, the issue was that Auto populated scores for late/missing work were removing the Missing coloration in the Gradebook automatically.  

From the later comments, it appears the issue has been resolved and I am hopeful that is the case.

The work around involved the teacher manually marking the missing assignments which isn't a work around, just more work.

[dguillot]

The video that goes with this update is misleading. It suggests that using the "Set Default Grade" option won't change the missing status. This is not correct. If you refresh the grade book after setting default grades, all of the missing statuses disappear. It just doesn't show it immediately.

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, yes our product team is aware and our engineers are working to correct that behavior now. Please reference  [OPEN] 'Apply missing ungraded as zeroes' feature ... - Instructure Community

Thanks,

Erin

[jsailor]

This issue has been resolved and the hotfix pushed live to production. 

[kbulman]

I agree with so many previous posts. I can see the value in having the missing status label disappear, but only if the manually entered grade is a non-zero score. I can also attest to the fact that setting a default score of zero also removes the missing status labels. 

[tinberst]

I have been trying to get this feature to work, and it seems to work only sporadically. Putting in a new grade does not remove the missing status, and when I backspace the zero in the gradebook, it simply returns. Is there a reason this is happening?

[cannaday_ra]

tinberst

What kind of assignments are you using? I know there are issues with the External Tool Submission types not removing the missing flag.

[tinberst]

Website URL or file upload

[jsailor]

Hi, @tinberst,

We are not hearing of any widespread issues with this feature. Could you please submit a support ticket so that our support team can help troubleshoot? If needed, they can then also loop in our product and engineering teams if they find a issue that needs to be addressed at that level. Thanks! 

[mrbeck]

In the experience of myself and members of my staff, the missing flag automatic removal only works on Online submissions and some External Tools. It does NOT work for no submission or on paper. Is this a purposeful choice? My teachers love that flag automatically going away... they would just like that to happen for no submission and on paper as well.