New Product Manager for Enhanced Rubrics - Introduction and Call for Feedback

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hello Everyone,

I’m excited to introduce myself as the new Product Manager for Enhanced Rubrics! My name is Yasi, and I recently joined Instructure on the Evaluate team, where I'll focus on all things related to grading and assessment in Canvas. I’m thrilled to be diving into Enhanced Rubrics and making improvements based on your feedback.

As I step into this role, I’ve been reviewing your posts in this group to help shape our priorities and ensure we’re delivering meaningful enhancements to rubrics. Your feedback is critical to that process, and I’m so appreciative of the thought and care this community brings.

Instructor Feedback Requested

We’d love to hear even more from instructors - those who have worked with Enhanced Rubrics and can tell us what’s working and what’s not. If you’re an instructor (or can connect me with one from your institution), I’d be grateful for the chance to chat in a quick 30-minute feedback call about your experience using rubrics in Canvas. If you’re interested, sign up here and we’ll get something scheduled.

Thank you again for all you do - your insights truly help shape the future of Canvas!

Yasi

[BrunoVerplaetse]

Hi

I'm using Canvas for a while now. In the old Canvas you could decide to withdraw or add points to the rubric at any time. This is in the new Canvas replaced by 'hide or unhide the totals score from students'. But by hiding the total score you still can see the points in the rubric. Is there a possiblity to hide all the points in the rubric? 

I'm asking this because I want to give formative feedback to the students during the schoolyear and only to show the summative evaluation at the end. 

Also, by hiding points, I want to avoid that students will calculate their received points during the schoolyear in order to decide wether they should keep doing on efforts.

Thx for giving the possibility to give direct feedback. Looking forwards to see your answer. 

Best regards

Bruno Verplaetse

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @BrunoVerplaetse, 

Thanks for reaching out, this is really helpful context for us.

Right now, hiding the total score doesn’t hide individual point values in the rubric, but it's a good idea and we can consider adding that as part of future improvements. Specifically, we’d look at options to hide total points in the rubric when the score is hidden from students.

Appreciate you flagging this, it's a great suggestion! 

[audra_agnelly]

Hi @YasiAfsharnive! We were doing some testing this afternoon to determine if we will enable this at our institution over the summer. One road block we've run into is the Display number which appears to be an index number that always starts from 0. This will be confusing to instructors for many reasons:

• 0, 1, 2, .... may or may not be a rating values instructors are using, and may not align with course or institutional grading policies
• Instructors are not able to edit these display numbers
• In the editor it is unclear why display number and point values would be different and what the meaning of display number or where it's used
• In speedgrader when we switch to horizontal or vertical mode, we see where it's used, but now teachers are forced to select the display numbers that don't align with their rubric rating points. I think this is the most confusing aspect for instructors.

I see this concern has been brought up in several posts in the community but did not see any follow Instructure. Is this being addressed? I would like to see these values default to the rubric point values. If that is not possible due to the point range options, can it at least be an editable field so that it can be set to numbers that make sense to each instructor?

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @audra_agnelly, 

Thank you so much for bringing this up! The timing is actually perfect, as we just aligned internally on the next steps for our Enhanced Rubrics project, and this is one of the areas we’ll be addressing.

We’ve heard similar feedback about the confusion around display numbers, especially when they don’t match point values or grading scales. I can confirm that one of the upcoming updates will give instructors the option to replace the criteria display numbers with point values that match each rating.

We’ll be sharing a public feature roadmap soon that outlines all the Enhanced Rubrics improvements coming by the end of Q3, stay tuned!

Thanks again for testing this and sharing such clear feedback. It’s really helpful as we refine the experience.

[NienkeVDR]

Hi Yasi,

a few extra options in the Rubrics would be great:

- Option to hide the names of the teacher who graded the work.

- Option to insert (saved) comments from a dropdown menu. We already did in the previous version of the rubrics, through a workaround. Now it's not possible anymore, but built-in by default, also usable in the rubric with the 'range display' would be a great help.

- Allow decimal numbers to be typed with a comma instead of a period.

- Option to edit the range (and some other little 'mistakes'), even after grading the students.  

Thanks for giving the possibility to give direct feedback.

Best regards,
Nienke

[dorgant]

Hi,

As we prepare to pilot Outcomes, a few questions have come up—particularly around the ability to add more than one rubric to an assignment. For example, I have an assignment that I use to grade students, but it's also being used to assess Program-Level Outcomes for the course. I know we can add Outcomes (that don’t count toward the final grade) to an existing rubric—but students can still see those Outcome criteria and cause confusion.

It would also be helpful if we had the option to completely hide rubrics, at least when it comes to Outcomes. With the current setup, we’re anticipating questions from students when they see these items on their grades page. Even if instructors explain what they’re seeing, there will likely still be confusion.

In our use case, none of the Outcomes scores will count towards the course grade, being able to hide anything associated with Outcomes would be really helpful.

thanks,

Tom 

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @NienkeVDR, 

Thanks so much for sharing this thoughtful feedback, these are all great suggestions, and it’s incredibly helpful to hear what would make rubrics more effective in your workflow.

Here’s a quick response to each point:

• Hiding grader names: This is a great suggestion, especially in the context of double marking or peer assessment. This is something we've worked on, although we do not have an ETA just yet. 

• Saved comments / dropdown: You're right, we’re aware that the previous workaround isn’t possible in the current version, we have support for saved comments (integrated with the Comment Library). Is it that you want saved comments to be easier or quicker to access when grading?

• Decimal comma support: Good catch. This is a known limitation, and we understand it’s important for users in regions that use commas instead of periods. We’re tracking this as an enhancement.

• Editing after grading: Yes! As you mentioned, we do plan to support post-grading edits in the new rubrics, including fixing ranges and other small changes, so that’s on the way.

We really appreciate you taking the time to share this directly. It helps us shape a better experience! 

Best regards,
Yasi

[YasiAfsharnive]

Hi @dorgant, 

Thanks so much for sharing this use case. We're currently exploring the need to assess using multiple rubrics and want to better understand the different types of feedback instructors want to share (or not share) with students. Your point about hiding Outcome-related criteria is especially helpful, as that’s not something we had considered yet.

If you’re open to sharing more, we’d love to hear from you in a short user interview. You can sign up here: Sign up to share your experience.

Thanks!