[Assignments] Assignments within weighted groups treated with equal value regardless of points

[lse224]

Please excuse the verbose title.

Our faculty want the option to have assignments within an assignment group to be given the same weight even if they are graded on different point values.

For example:

Assignment Group = Homework  25% of final grade

Homework 1 10 pts

Homework 2 15 pts

Homework 3 10 pts

etc.

Currently, the homework #2 which is worth 15 points will have a larger influence over the grade than homeworks 1 or 3. We can encourage faculty to grade all assignments within a group on the same point-value scale, but there are 3,000 of them and four of us. Additionally, our previous LMS, Blackboard, allowed the user to opt to weigh all of the assignments WITHIN a group equally. Faculty are very upset by this lack in functionality ESPECIALLY when they become aware of the miscalculation right before final grades are due.

Thanks,

-Lea

[Renee_Carney]

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

[olliebrown]

There has been controversy with the gradebook in our university's LMS since long before Canvas.  We have LMS liaisons from IT strongly recommending against a weighted textbook period (that points-only approaches are better).  When we complain about the inability to conceptualize our courses the way we want (due to limitations like the one mentioned in this feature request) we are told that we are 'doing it wrong' and we should accept the limitation; that our teaching concept is wrong.  Then there are comments like the one from Kona here (Weight all quizzes equally within a weighted category) where she literally says that the actual points don't matter.  This sounds just like what our LMS liaisons say all over again.

What she says is really opinion not fact (and psychologically, I think they matter a great deal to the student).  Making all the questions on a quiz the same points (like she suggests) when some are aggressively harder than others is not good practice.  Try to imagine an easy T/F question with a 50/50 chance of being correct that takes 5 seconds to answer weighted the same as a lengthy essay question with multiple nuances that must be hit in a correct answer, and is expected to take 5 minutes.  Those of us on the front lines, teaching 24 credit hours a year with low pay and classrooms packed full have little sympathy for being told we have the wrong concept, we just need help!  I know that mathematically I could just do the work myself and get it done, but ain't nobody got time for that!  It is hard for a human to do this and it will be prone to mistakes but a computer can do it easily and perfectly every time.  Seems like a no-brainer for a software feature to me.

Bigger picture, I do not understand this strong-arm approach with your stakeholders.  Granted, all the experiences above are not coming from Instructure, they are from our internal IT department (and believe me, I've expressed these same concerns to them), but a requirements discovery process that did not identify this as a feature to begin with, let alone one that has ignored it being requested for over three years, shows inklings of this same strong-arm approach.  Perhaps this particular request has not received enough 'votes'.  Well a LOT of your stakeholders will never be reached with a system like this.  This is a system designed for millennials more than instructors.  Going  to search for and recommend features and requiring an idea to gather votes, while easy to manage on your end and requiring no outreach, is going to miss-count support for ideas pretty horrendously.

Please don't consider the low number of votes on this to be a sign that it is not important.  What I perceive as your two main competitors (Blackboard and Brightspace) offer this feature and have for years.  I also genuinely think it is not hard and should have little danger of causing issues if done correctly:

• Every group has a checkbox labeled "weight all assignments in this group equally"
  • It can live along-side the options that are already there for editing the name, weight, and dropping assignments.
• The checkbox defaults to off so no new behavior happens for those that are used to Canvas
• When enabled, the gradebook scales the points each assignment is worth so that they are weighted equally under the hood without confusing the instructor or requiring them to do the scaling themselves.
  • Basically, what Kona describes here (Weight all quizzes equally within a weighted category), only done automatically by the grading engine, not by the teacher manually.
  • Keep in mind, if it must be done manually, per Kona's suggestion, you have to update your calculations every time you add a new quiz/assignment (or wait until they are all in there).  Simple for your software to do, a nightmare for the instructor.
    • I make my quizzes weekly during the semester so that I can make sure they match what we managed to get to that week (so please don't say I should simply have them all done before the semester starts).

From there it's Q/A & testing and okay, I can believe that a gradebook change takes a tremendous among of testing but this is minimal risk with this change so it should be worth that risk.  I might have my students fork the Canvas code base and try implementing this themselves (just as a way for them to see that their LMS is open source and built in technologies they already know) but that's not relevant here ... I'll send you guys the pull request once it's done ... 😉 j/k I assume such a pull request from a random old fart like me would not be welcome ... maybe.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox for now.  Just wanted to make sure and add my voice to this discussion and STRONGLY encourage making this happen.

Seth B.

[pfau]

I agree with Seth. Online voting is a lazy way for Instructure to get feedback (I hope they are also using other approaches also, but I don't see evidence of it). I also agree that a feature that is important to instructors and is available in their competitors' systems is a no-brainer for a company to implement. Instructure, are you listening? 

[audra_agnelly]

Sharing this comment from one of our HS teachers in our year-end survey:

"Make it possible to have more control over the weighting of grades in the gradebook. As is you can only weight a category and then weighting within that category is dependent on the number of points assigned to each assignment. That is fine if you want different assignments in the same category to have a different weight, but it becomes time consuming and tiresome if you want all of the assignments to have the same weight. For example, if I determine that I want quizzes to be worth 20% of the final grade, but I want all quizzes to be equal to each other, I have to make all of them have the same point value. If I make one worth 20 points and another worth 5 points then the one worth 20 will have more weight toward the final grade. It would be easier to have a feature that would flatten all assignments in a category regardless of point totals. This is especially nice for unit exams where making each exam have the same number of points means more work and perhaps redundancy in testing items."

[lynn_poth]

I asked about this same thing last winter as it was causing issues for our faculty as well. I think it is a relatively simple calculation functionality that is prevalent in many systems (I last used D2L and that was an option). It would help out many faculty.

Thank you for bringing it back up!

Lynn

[wiegreffe]

This is a vital functionality!  I teach a lab science and each lab is equally "important" but some labs due to their complexity have a lot more things that can be graded and therefore have more "points".  We had this functionality in Blackboard and now we don't.  It's just kooky that this isn't available in Canvas - chink in the armor - and a big one at that.  Please please please fix this - don't make me keep grades on Excel.  

Holly

[apetrie]

It's mind-boggling that Canvas doesn't have this feature after so many years of requests.  Why are instructors forced to design their assignments and point totals around an arbitrary Canvas restriction?  Give us the freedom to determine a logical value for the points awarded on an assignment, and give us the option to have the percentages achieved on each assignment be treated equally.  

[sarah-canatsey]

In my previous LMS, the options for any assignment group in a weighted gradebook were:

Canvas is missing the "Weight items equally" option. Agreed, it should be in the options. Otherwise, my faculty have to create multiple groups to get the same results. It's much clunkier. 

Multiple groups also means a clunkier and more confusing gradebook for students to view, since each group gets an column in the gradebook for the group average. I had a faculty spend several hours adjusting grades in Excel because this function doesn't exist. And saying, "Well, just make everything worth the same" is not an acceptable answer for a function that's available on multiple other LMS platforms. 

[matthewthomas]

Seeing that there are several different (and differently worded) ideas posted that all get at this in one way or another is frustrating to us who would just like to be able to shape our gradebooks as we want. 

I grade items usually as a percentage, but sometimes points make more sense. These three things should be separate and not automatically linked to one another (options to link them, fine; but don't force them):

1. The number of points for an assignment
2. The weighting of assignments within an assignment group
3. The weighting of assignment groups within the course grade

If you want points to drive it, great. If not, sure. If you want a complex mix, so be it. Let us as instructors set our gradebooks to work FOR us instead of against us.

I have taught and taken courses in at least 4 other LMSs, and--to my recollection--they all had a way to do this.

[don_bryn]

After using Canvas for so many years, I have even stopped voting on the SAME request that has come up for YEARS!!!!   It's a useless activity as I've never seen any actual response to it.  I've read all the excuses. . . like it's the same people voting each time this request comes up, etc.  Canvas, Just get it done.  If I had a choice I would be pushing for a boycott of Canvas until they fix it.  But because school systems are stuck with Canvas unless the whole state changes, Canvas does not have to actually provide the features the instructors want.

This request should be a STICKY and never go away.   That way Canvas will know exactly how many people have requested this feature.