[Assignments] Assign to everyone except selected students

There are some assignments that go out to the majority of my students except one or two per class. It would be great to be able to assign to "everyone" and then have a button to select which students are exempt from the assignment.

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166 Comments
sara_samples1
Community Participant

I still cannot copy a quiz.   How are you doing this?  

lshulman
Community Participant

Use the three vertical dots to right of quiz (or assignment). Select "copy to..." from drop down menu:

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To copy to the same course, just select the course you are in:

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You can also select a module to add it to at this time (or just add it after the fact):

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You can also tell it where in the module to place it:

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Then just hit "copy":

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sara_samples1
Community Participant

Maybe they have fixed the issue, but in the past if you copied a quiz to the same course and then made changes, it made changes to both copies.  I learned this the hard way when I made a copy of a quiz and then modified it by removing a distractor and breaking up all the matching questions into just three options with no additional distractors.  Luckily, I had all the original questions in test banks and was able to create a new quiz and import the questions again.

lshulman
Community Participant

Hmm, I did a quiz copy in my spring semester course for a blind student. Had to remove a visual question, adding something else in its place. 

I just checked and yes, the original questions remains in the original exam, even though I made the change in the blind student's quiz. 

I DID change the quiz name in the copied quiz. So maybe that is what you need to be sure to do before editing the copy. Identify it as different simply by renaming it with a number "2" or the student's name in the title. 

kimberly_smith1
Community Participant

Hello  @lshulman  ,

Thank you for your suggestion. Yes, I think that would work. When I posted about this issue in 2018 we were not yet using the New Gradebook, so I was not aware of the EX option then.

burford_furman
Community Explorer

I wonder if the Canvas developers would consider adding something like the ability to upload a CSV file that would contain the names of students in the first column and the other parameters for the Assignment settings in the other columns. For any given assignment, the CSV file could have all the particular settings for any given student as a row in the file. This would allow instructors to easily duplicate information for other assignments by copying the file, making global Find-Replace changes in the CSV file, and uploading back to the Assignment.

I think that the Canvas team needs to expand the capabilities of the user interface in general. For those of us who teach large classes, the time required for so many individual clicks and discreet entries multiplies unsustainably as the numbers go up.

lshulman
Community Participant

So basically the reverse of downloading (exporting) the gradebook. You want to upload your gradebook.

Aside from this idea being way off focus of the original idea being discussed here, I can't see Canvas choosing to add such a feature. Just uploading a .CSV gradebook is not going to create assignments in Canvas that students can use to submit work.

If you want to use excel to create your gradebook, just use that. Unless it is a matter of your school requiring you to use the Canvas gradebook.

- Laura Shulman

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/<https://mail.nvcc.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=1c304ebbbd9647619d0159857a...;

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The more we know, the more we know, there's more to know, than we think we know!

awedwards
Community Explorer

I think Burford meant was for an assignment, not the whole gradebook. I wish for a similar yet lower tech solution where I can copy in a comma-separated list into the Assign To box rather than type every name individually.

burford_furman
Community Explorer

Yes, Antony, that is what I was thinking about; for an Assignment, not the whole Gradebook.

Steven_S
Community Champion

A similar thing happened to me when I copied an updated quiz to another section that already used that quiz name.  I believe the key is in the name of the quiz.  If you copy a quiz, change it's name before you edit it.  Even a single character works, you can add a space or a hyphen and canvas will know it's a different quiz.  If you are copying to a new course, update the name in the first course to something not yet used in the new course before copying.