[Gradebook] What if grading for instructors

 

Currently instructors cannot create hypothetical scores for students like What-If scores. This would be very helpful as we get close to the end of the quarter to see if a student has the ability to reach a particular grade or not.

Added to Theme

Provide more flexible grading options Theme Status: Identified

73 Comments
Steven_S
Community Champion

This can be done manually using the test student... First go to the settings tab and select view as a student.  Then click the button at the bottom of the screen to leave student view.  Then there will be a new "student" always at the bottom of the list in the gradebook, "Test Student."  Manually enter for "Test Student" duplicate grades matching the student you are helping, and then add "what if" grades as needed. 

It would be really helpful if there was an option to set the test student to match: (select from drop down list of enrolled students)

tflanagan
Community Explorer

This feature would be so helpful! Please add it.

RobDitto
Community Champion

steven I really like your idea about the Test Student:

It would be really helpful if there was an option to set the test student to match: (select from drop down list of enrolled students)

If you haven't already, check out a popular feature idea which relates to your comment:

gnoack
Community Champion

Please add this functionality to Canvas.  I would use it weekly to monitor my students progress. Currently I have to export the gradebook and create formulas to determine possible grades for students, and I have to do this each time as more grades are added throughout the semester.  

kredwar2
Community Novice

PLEASE add this function as it would make my job so much easier and it would help me see what the students are talking about. 

Thank you

Chris_Hofer
Community Coach
Community Coach

Full disclosure...  I'm an admin for our Canvas instance and do not teach courses...so I may not know all the reasons for wanting a "what if" feature for instructors.  However, have you considered using your school's Canvas "beta" environment for this?  How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an instructor?   According to What is the Canvas release schedule for beta, production, and test environments?, the beta refresh happens every Saturday:

The beta environment is refreshed with data from the production environment every Saturday. Any work or content added to the beta environment will be overwritten.   
      

*An exact time when the beta environment will be overwritten by production will vary for every organization.

If you did any grading in your school's "production" environment after a Saturday refresh, those grades wouldn't be reflected in the "beta" environment (so a bit of work might need to be done to enter those grades there, too).  But, using the "beta" environment would allow you to try out those "what if" or hypothetical scenarios without messing with the actual grades in your "production" environment.

My $0.02 as a work-around for the time being...

awarmar
Community Participant

This may not be the case at other institutions, but at ours, you have to request access to our beta environment from our Canvas Admin. So, while this is a great idea (and since I have access to our beta, I have done exactly as you suggest in the course I adjunct for in the past) it won't work for the majority of our faculty and I would suspect other institutions are in the same boat as well. 

ksultzbach
Community Novice

Yes--this is really important.  If a student has extenuating circumstances, you also need to be able to play with with options both for past grades (if you want to give them an opportunity to revise or re-take) as well as advise them on what kinds of grades would be needed for future assignments.  Please do give instructors access to this important tool.

sara_samples1
Community Participant

I have always wanted this feature, but now that we are learning at home, I NEED this feature.  I no longer have the option of calling kids in during office hours and sitting down with them to mess with 'what if'  grades on their screen.

Our district does not give us the ability to view the class as a specific student, only as a generic test student, so I have to copy over all the grades a student has earned into the test student's gradebook in order to test what if scores in the student view.  (If you do this by downloading and uploading the gradebook as spreadsheets, it's not an impossible work around, but ugh).

I also would love this feature to be available to observers.  As an advisor I ended up doing a lot of math by hand on post it notes to figure out what my kiddos should concentrate on for final exams, and this would have been so much faster.  Smiley Wink

thompsli
Community Champion

I have an Excel spreadsheet saved that I've programmed with all of my grading categories and weights just so I can do "what if" for myself. It's so exasperating.