Grading a new quiz with several attempts: teachers might not grade the right attempt

[LauraJiménez]

Hi everyone,

I was doing some testing and I found out that teachers might not grade the highest scored attempt.

I created a New Quiz and set it to allow multiple attempts and select the highest score as the grade. I also included essay and upload file questions,

I then delivered 2 attempts as a student, the first one having the highest score, and the second one having a very low score.

When I navigate to the SpeedGrader to grade the essay and upload file questions, I can see both attempts, but the teacher would have to remember that they need to grade the highest scored attempt, even though it's not the last attempt.

In the following screenshot you can see the ungraded last attempt, having the lowest score. 

If we grade it, the grade on the right menu will still be 68,52, as the first attempt still has the highest score.

The problem is that the teacher should grade the first attempt (the one with the highest score), the one that's displaying a warning message on the menu on the right.

Once it's graded, the final grade for the quiz will change:

I think this is a bit risky, as teachers might not know or might forget that they should not be grading the last attempt, but the one with the highest/lowest score instead.

Would it be possible to display a message similar to "Note: This is not the most recent submission", such as "Note: This is not the highest scored submission"?

Has anyone encountered this before?

Thanks in advance! 

[gnoack]

@LauraJiménez 

If I understand your setup correctly, I think this is expected and actually correct behavior.  If you include manually graded questions in a quiz, Canvas can't tell you which attempt is actually the best attempt until all questions have been scored.  A lot depends on the worth of questions and students responses. 

On a first attempt, a student could do poorly on the auto-graded questions but do well on the manual graded questions. If the manually graded questions are worth more, this might be a great score.

On a second attempt, the student could do very well on the auto-graded questions but do poorly or even skip the manually graded questions. 

Which one is the best attempt?

If you want to give multiple attempts and have it auto-grade, I would separate any manually graded question types from the quiz. You could have the essay type questions as a separate quiz. 

[gnoack · Accepted solution]

@LauraJiménez 

I did some testing of my own, as I was curious. This was with New Quizzes. 

I built a quiz with one multiple choice question and one essay question. I then submitted it three times. 

Before I graded the essay questions, it worked just as you described. However, after grading each attempt, Canvas gave the student the best score of the three attempts. 

So the system won't choose a best score until all attempts have been manually graded by an instructor. 

[LauraJiménez]

@gnoack 

You are actually right, it could be tricky to determine which is the best attempt, so basically, teachers should not mix auto-graded and manual graded questions in a same quiz or they should grade all the attempts. Maybe it would still be interesting to display a message, but in any case, this is definitely something to take into account when building quizzes.

Thanks for your help!