Disable "What If" Feature

(5)

As helpful as the "what if" feature can be, many students become obsessed with their grade as they create hypothetical situations that lead to "grade grubbing".  We all know too well the "I needed a 92 on the project to have an A and I was only one point away so is there anything I can do?" situation with a student.  

I propose that teachers have the capability of disabling this feature.

#mhs

Comments from Instructure

Thank you for your thoughts and participation around this request. It is never fun to hear about cheating or ways in which individuals abuse trust. We feel that the intended use of this feature is extremely valuable and continue to hear so from students. At this time we are not planning on removing or disabling “what if” functionality within Canvas.

This has been a good conversation, and the conversation can continue, but we will now close this idea for voting. It will remain in the Canvas Studio space, so there will not be a need for resubmission or re-vote of this idea. It has been considered and we have given an official response, even if it is not the one you were hoping for. Thank You.

117 Comments
rae_gerold-smit
Community Novice

While I can appreciate Leslie’s position on the What-If feature, I hardly think it reasonable to penalize conscientious students who use the function appropriately to manage those who do not.

julian_ebeli
Community Participant

Hi Scott. Creating the 'what if' feature is also a fork in the code. I am a Canvas admin not a teacher. I think the tool is a toy and shouldn't have been put into the code base in the first place!

alannah_roach
Community Participant

It really does depend on the way you grade.  In my particular educational setting (K-12), the averaging of grades over a year or grading period is not the way we assess. Is it fair that a student who starts the year poorly, but then improves and is demonstrating a great understanding of the required outcomes of a course by the end of the year, has their grades brought down by their poor start?

alannah_roach
Community Participant

They can still get into their grades from the dashboard and therefore see the what if function.

janine_bowes
Community Member

I think that a key aspect of this discussion is the fact that Canvas is sold internationally and there are different schools of thought about assessment in different cultures. As  @alannah_roach ‌ pointed out earlier in the discussion, in our K-12 Department of Education (in Australia), we do not assess by averaging grades over a year.

It is important that there is flexibility so we can get the best technical fit to our recommended assessment practices that are based on current evidence-based research. The hard wiring of this feature is directly at odds with this.

leslie_dow
Community Novice

I look at this as more of an instructor's choice. I expect that you and I would choose differently but that does not mean that I should enforce my ways of teaching on you. Canvas forces us into certain behaviors, this is one of them. There is no consensus on how or why this feature exists. The developers thought it would be useful. It is not required to teach or to manage grades, therefore it should be optional. I think it would also fine for having the option to turn it on or off configurable by a school admin as it does seem like it has policy considerations and schools have a right to enforce those, but having a community of users like us, or the developers or product managers decide for everyone is overreach, IMO. 

laurakgibbs
Community Champion

I agree  @leslie_dow ‌ ... grading is a very complicated and perilous business.

I was extremely dismayed when Canvas started putting red labels in the Gradebook for (supposedly) late and (supposedly) missing assignments which, in my classes, were not late or missing at all. It caused my students distress, which means it caused me distress.

From what I understand, I cannot suppress those red labels globally in the New Gradebook, only assignment by assignment. I have over 200 microassignments in my classes (students choose what they want to do). I cannot switch to the New Gradebook even if there are some features that would be useful to me because I cannot allow Canvas to override how I choose to communicate with students about grades.

Boekenoogen
Community Contributor

There seems that this feature would cause too many issues and confusion to the students. 

witherm
Community Novice

I just want the option of turning it on or off.

c_murphy
Community Participant

Our institution has the totals column disabled by default for all courses, so the 'what if' feature is just confusing and nonsensical for our students. They don't know what it means. We'd like to be able to disable it.

thompsli
Community Champion

This is a use case I wasn't aware of, and is a very good argument for either this feature being turned off automatically when "totals" are disabled (is there any use case where you'd want "what if" on but no totals? I can't see how that would help), or for having a way to turn this feature off.

blchitty
Community Member

We need to be able to control the use of What-If grades at the k-12 level. We have a hard time educating parents about this and students are taking advantage of this tool to show parents a different grade. This puts our educators in a bad position. There is really no indicator that this has been done outside of an arrow. The second reason this needs to be controlled is because students use this tool to see what they do not need to do more than they look at it as what they need to earn. It is causing students to do bare minimum to get the letter grade. Please support K-12 teachers and lets get this to the engineers! 

cawilliams
Community Novice

Teachers need the ability to disable this feature because students are using it for the wrong reason. They plug in grades and show their parents that as a true grade, but it is in fact false information. The other issues are that they see which assignments they don't want to complete; however, my school has weighted categories and this is not telling the student the entire story of their grade at the end of the semester by having incomplete assignments.    

khellyer
Community Novice

It would be great if this was a feature that schools could opt out of. I have had so many instances where students have figured out that if they contest a grade on one assignment, it will bring their cumulative grade up. I'm not sure what the purpose of this feature is, but can you please allow schools to opt out?!

witherm
Community Novice

I do not want the school to be able to opt out I want every teacher to be able to opt out like a toggle switch. It should be up to the individual teacher for whatever reason they choose to do it.

Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>

chriscas
Community Coach
Community Coach

While I'm still going to leave my vote as a no for the time being, I do see a lot of different options and scenarios being talked about here and would like to leave some additional feedback.

I'd agree that if the "totals" columns are hidden that the what-if feature doesn't make much sense anymore since no final calculations should show.

I'd also agree that the feature might be more confusing for K-12 that higher-ed (though I know that's a very big blanket statement that won't always be true).

When looking at all of the scenarios, I think what might make the most sense here would be an account-level feature option (much like we have for ePub exporting, Learning Mastery Gradebook, etc) where the school could choose to have What-If Grading set to On (students could use it in all courses), Allow (let the faculty member decide for each course), or Off (What-If would not be available for any courses at all).

Even if this suggestion were implemented, I don't think it's necessarily going to fix the problem of students altering their grades and showing them to parents.  The F12 method built into pretty much every browser makes it very easy to change things without looking any different at all.  However, there are other benefits that others pointed out here so I could support it as the feature option where almost everyone could get things configured how they (or the school) would like.  I'd certainly hate to see the feature go away completely as I think it's a pretty useful tool for students to use, even if it means they may put a little less effort into certain classes or assignments at some point if they are satisfied with a specific grade and know what they need to score on each assignment to achieve it.

khall66
Community Novice

I agree. Each teacher should have the option.

Kim W. Hall

Adjunct Instructor, Medical Terminology

Frank L. Hilton, M.D., School of Health Sciences

Ivy Tech Community College – Evansville Campus

Cell Phone: 1-812-431-7130

khall66@ivytech.edu

Changing Lives. Making Indiana Great.

drummond_r
Community Participant

I have has several students try to convince me give them multiple attempts even beyond what is allowed because of the "what-if" feature. 

mattg
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Thank you for your thoughts and participation around this request. It is never fun to hear about cheating or ways in which individuals abuse trust. We feel that the intended use of this feature is extremely valuable and continue to hear so from students. At this time we are not planning on removing or disabling “what if” functionality within Canvas.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Thank you Matt for your honesty and transparency here. 

This has been a good conversation, and the conversation can continue, but we will now close this idea for voting.  It will remain in the Canvas Studio space, so there will not be a need for resubmission or re-vote of this idea.  It has been considered and we have given an official response, even if it is not the one you were hoping for.  Thank You.