Get submission for all the users for course

[test29]

Submission api is not working /api/v1/courses/116/students/submissions 
i have tried root token and sub account token also for both its giving only 

{

    "status": "unauthorized",

    "errors": [

        {

            "message": "user not authorized to perform that action"

        }

    ]

}

[melodyc_lam · Accepted solution]

@test29 Welcome! This API endpoint requires request parameters to retrieve submission data, otherwise it defaults to retrieving your submissions (which you may not have any in the course.) Could you provide a sanitized version of what code or call you're trying to make on this endpoint? That will help us troubleshoot your call. Thanks!

[melodyc_lam · Accepted solution]

@test29 Welcome! This API endpoint requires request parameters to retrieve submission data, otherwise it defaults to retrieving your submissions (which you may not have any in the course.) Could you provide a sanitized version of what code or call you're trying to make on this endpoint? That will help us troubleshoot your call. Thanks!

[test29]

Thanks for you reply - 
 

We are using the following API flow in our sandbox instance (https://mylearnerjourney.instructure.com😞

1. To fetch assignment groups and assignment IDs:

GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/assignment_groups?include[]=assignment_visibility&include[]=assignments&scope_assignments_to_student=true&include[]=submission

2. For each assignment, we fetch submissions using:

GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/assignments/:assignment_id/submissions?include[]=user&per_page=100

This approach works but is inefficient for large courses (3,000+ users) due to multiple paginated calls per assignment.

To optimize this, we attempted to use the bulk API:

GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/students/submissions?per_page=100&include[]=assignment&include[]=user

However, this consistently returns a permission error — even when using a Root Admin access token:

{  "status": "unauthorized",  "errors": [    {      "message": "user not authorized to perform that action"    }  ] }

We have verified:

• The course belongs to the correct account
• The admin role has full permissions (View all grades, View user list, etc.)
• The token used is from a root-level admin (not scoped via Developer Key)
• Other admin APIs are working correctly with the same token

Could you please assist us in identifying why this endpoint is rejecting even authorized admin access?

Any clarification or guidance would be highly appreciated, as this endpoint is critical for performance optimization on our platform.

FYI - I am trying in postman right now but its not working

[test29]

my supplementary question   will this api GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/students/submissions?per_page=100&include[]=assignment&include[]=user get called by sub account admin ? in my test account i have admin right but in actual scenario will have to manage with sub-account admin.

[melodyc_lam]

@test29 As long as the subaccount admin has the correct permissions, they will be able to access that API endpoint.

[melodyc_lam]

@test29 It looks like you're not specifying student_ids as stated in the API documentation. Right now it's trying to get your submissions out of the course, which you probably don't have any as a developer/admin. Try including this parameter in your call in Postman before you utilize it in your code. Good luck!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @test29,

As @melodyc_lam mentioned, the call you're trying to use needs additional parameters to specify which students you're trying to get submissions for, otherwise it defaults to trying to get submissions for the owner of the API token (which is you, and you're not a student, therefore submissions doesn't make sense and probably leads to that error message).  The relevant parameter you need to look at in the API documentation is student_ids[].  If you want to get all submissions for all students, simply adding '&student_ids[]=all' to your URL should do the trick.

Hope this helps!

-Chris