Canvas Gradebook - Assignments equally and/or proportionally weighted?

sean_flaherty
Community Participant

I'm curious how many of you (or your colleagues) would like to see a feature added to the Canvas Gradebook that would allow you to easily weight assignments equally (or proportionally) regardless of the number of points.  Personally, this would make my life easier.  Also, I've found 4 different Feature Ideas recently which are essentially asking for this although each idea is coming from a slightly different point of view.  Unfortunately, the Feature Ideas that have come up for voting in the past have all fallen short of the 100 votes required to move the feature along in the development process.

Perhaps you have a homework group in your gradebook and you'd like all of those assignments to be weighed equally in your gradebook even though each assignment can have different point values... does that sound like something you'd like? 

Maybe within that homework group, you want to reward students who did well on a really tough assignment by weighing it twice as much as one of the other assignments even though it may have had the same or fewer points when you graded it... is that a feature you would use?

Maybe if/when you give exams, you'd like to simple let the test be out of how many points the test is out of instead of playing with the points so they work out nicely (50 points, 100 points, etc).  You could have a test that was out of 45 weighed the same as a test that was out of 62 weighed the same as a test that was out of 51... or have your final exam weighed more heavily even though it only had 61 points when you graded it.

Right now, everybody I know that wants to weigh assignments equally or proportionally within their gradebook has to play with the numbers, perform various calculations outside of Canvas (likely on a spreadsheet students don't have access to), and then plug in the new calculated values into Canvas.  The numbers lose a bit of meaning to the students this way and it's burdensome for the instructors.

Anyhow, I'm just trying to find out how many people would benefit from this feature or something like it so that I can rally the troops, so to speak, to make sure we get enough votes in the future.  Every other online gradebook I have used in the past has had this feature and I'd really like to see it developed in Canvas.

Thanks.

Sean