[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

[ajw13]

This conversation has been going on for five years yet nothing has been resolved.  Again today I posted a comment for Canvas to offer even the simple feature of letting instructors choose points to grade a category thus allowing different weighting to assignments in that category, or choose percentage which would allow instructor to equally weight the category assignments by these assignments being treated as percentages.  This aligns with what "bentont" described above in their table (repeated below). 

My response from Canvas was the usual: "Thanks for sharing!  Here are some similar topics.  We encourage you to add your comments there."  I ask why?  Rarely does anything get resolved.  Blackboard and even ANGEL allowed for this flexibility.  I am getting tired of the rinse/repeat action of Canvas without anything changing.

Item with in a category	Current Situation	Proposed Option
Quiz 1	35/40  (87.5%)	35/40  (87.5%)
Quiz 2	45/75   (60%)	45/75   (60%)
Quiz 3	19/20   (95%)	19/20   (95%)
Quiz 4	28/30   (93%)	28/30   (93%)
Quiz 5:	35/50   (70%)	35/50   (70%)
Average score to be given the assigned category weight.	162/215  GRADE = 75%	405.5/500 GRADE = 81%
	This shows the student mastered 75% of the questions asked.	This can show the student mastered 81% of the objectives tested (even though some objectives may have had more questions).

[amyslack]

As someone who has been assisting instructors moving from another LMS that was capable of this to Canvas which does easily I now see the importance of this suggestion. Within a category giving instructors the option to check a box to equally weight the items instead of the default points approach would help since it appears that is still a common way to approach grading. It would prevent the extra work that goes into workarounds to try to achieve this that likely introduces errors into student grades and causes a lot of confusion. So Canvas - please consider giving instructors the option to equally weight grades within a category without having to make all the points for all assignments within that category the same number of points. 

[jordand]

I want to create an assignment group for quizzes that is worth 15% of the overall course grade. Within that group I might have 7 quizzes all worth different point values. Regardless of available points I want each quiz to be worth 10% within the Quiz category. 

I can make each quiz its own assignment, but I still have to do the math to ensure that a 17 point quiz, for instance, is worth the same percentage as an 11 point quiz, and that each one of those adds up to the desired percentage for the intended overall assignment group.

BlackBoard made this incredibly simple to do and I don't understand why this feature is not available in Canvas. Canvas has essentially forced me to use a points system, which requires that I make internal calculations to be sure the various assignments are weighed correctly for a final grade.  (we use new quizzes)

[Gregory_Putman]

Hello,

New to Canvas, struggling to get my content from Blackboard up and ready for classes, just stumbled across this problem.  I'm shocked to see that this particular issue has been discussed since at least 2015 and still no action taken!  Please address this issue.  Canvas has so many neat features that probably took a lot of coding and development so I'm surprised that adding this feature to the grade book wasn't done long ago.

I really miss (pre-2007?) WebCT/Vista in which I could actually create my own custom calculations using any item(s) in the grade book and basic functions like +. -, *, /, parentheses, etc...  Of course that was lost when we migrated to Blackboard but at least we still could choose between using total points or percent scores - so could have average of percent scores or weighted averages of percent scores... now don't even have that option... how are we losing basic math features/options as technology becomes more powerful?

I want to show students percent scores for everything, have homework average (average of the percent scores so all homework assignments have equal weight regardless of total points on each being different), lab average (average of the percent scores so all labs have equal weight regardless of total points on each being different), quiz average (same) grades then do a weighted calculation of them.

It appears that I will need to convert all of my courses to having all homework assignments have the same total points so I'll either need to calculated each question to figure out strange fractional point scores (some questions take more effort than others so worth more of the individual homework score than others so each question will need calculating...) or will need to pad out assignments with varying numbers of throw-away questions just to even out total scores.  Rubrics for lab activities will need to be completely changed away from being customized to each lab activity (different topics have different procedures, analyses, conceptual questions, etc.) to some sort of overall, generic rubrics and revise lab activities to artificially be more similar to each other I suppose?  All before classes start...

If this isn't something that can be done then please make it so I can hide columns from students like the default grade calculations so I can add my own columns and make my own calculations offline in Excel and just go back and forth between Excel and Canvas multiple times each week to update grade calculations (typical semester sees about 20 total sections of 5 different courses so would be a lot of back and forth - computers are supposed to automate things like this...).

Sorry for being so negative about this, shows how important it is, though.

Please help.

[DaveDixon]

This has been here since 2016 and it's still not in Canvas? That belies the representation that user preferences matter. Coming from what is, arguably, the worst LMS - which had this feature - I endorse this most vigorously.

[ChrisC4]

I migrated from Moodle, and now ALL my assignments from myopenmath.com are obsolete. It is pathetic that Canvas does not have this simple feature. This will take me a very long time to weight individual questions in myopenmath so that the assignment totals are similar. I cannot believe we cannot at least have weight all assignment in a group equally. WOW!

[jdweiberg]

My institution has just switched over to Canvas. Our previous LMS allowed for each assignment to have different points within a group area and yet have each assignment weighted evenly. This is a very important feature for many of our programs.

This is a feature that should have been created when the first person inquired about it. Please re-assess this feature as it makes the life of our instructors so much easier when it comes to grading.