Missing Assignments Indicator

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baileyc
Community Novice

Can marking assignments missing being disabled? I have assignments that some students submit to, but mostly I manually enter the grade. I'm noticing that for students whose grade was manually added without a submission from them it is marked missing. #missing

5 Solutions
awilliams
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Hey  @baileyc ‌, it sounds like maybe you still have the "Submission Type" set to "Online" for those assignments you intend to manually grade. Have you tried changing the submission type to "On Paper" or "No Submission" to see if that affects the "Missing" indicator? Here are a few community resources for assignments that would help with editing assignment details.

 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10113-415241285 

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Ahh, I see. In the event of online submission types that you want to also allow "on paper" I don't think there's any way to tell Canvas it was turned in that way instead of just "missing." That would be a new feature (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-2109-how-does-the-voting-process-work-for-feature-ideas?sr=...‌)

However, if you allow "Text Entry" as a submission option, the students could just type in "I turned this in to you on paper on Thursday, Aug. 3rd" or something. After grading them you should be free of the missing label then. Would that work for you?

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James
Community Champion

If it's graded, obviously its not missing. 

I can think of circumstances where this may not be true. Some people go through and put in zeros once an assignment is due to give an extra nudge to the students who haven't submitted it. Others go through and put in zeros for everything at the beginning of the term because they want the percent to build towards 100% rather than reflecting what has been graded so far. Technically, those are still missing, even if there is no longer an opportunity for the student to turn it in.

You might be able to say that a positive grade means it has been submitted, but you can't infer the same for a zero as it's possible that the student turned it in on paper and got a 0 for whatever reason. This discussion kind of reminds me of the text messages that Canvas sent out in the spring where many were up in arms about the wording. That test run has turned into Nudge (see InstCon0017 Product Announcements ) which is going through more testing before it's generally available.

As this is a new featureCanvas Production Release Notes (2017-08-05), it's possible that some refinement will need to be done.  @ProfessorBeyrer ‌ has already made a feature request to suppress this behavior for 0 point assignments. There was also a healthy discussion of it in the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-07-24), where Erin Hallmark made the comment that manually grading does not change the label and that you can check out future features in Priority: Gradebook Enhancements.

As for now, as it was in the past, educating students and informing them of what things mean can go along way towards alleviating misunderstandings and stress: "Missing means that you didn't submit it through Canvas and that's all it means. You should ignore this if you turned it in on paper." But I can guarantee that students are still going to freak out and forget what you told them.  Either that or it's going to happen so much that it loses its usefulness.

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kblack
Community Champion

Either that or it's going to happen so much that it loses its usefulness.

Exactly! That's my main concern with this right now. It will get to the point that an otherwise useful feature will just be ignored unless faculty are somehow able to override its behavior.

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erinhmcmillan
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Hi, Crystal,

The main reason your students were seeing the missing label is because Canvas only knows how to treat an assignment according to its submission designation. If you set the assignment as online, Canvas is looking for online submissions and there isn't a way to disable the missing label. So if you're using an assignment that can be submitted by students using another method, Canvas won't know.

We've been made more aware of this use case, and in the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-09-25) we've made a change that removes the missing and late labels from the student Grades page and submission details page. Only SpeedGrader shows the labels, which is the original behavior that existed before the labels were added for students in the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-08-05). So basically we've put everything back the way it was.

The missing and late labels are ultimately part of Gradebook Enhancements, which you can learn more about here: Priority: Gradebook Enhancements‌. Any institution that is currently part of the New Gradebook Focus Group will still show labels to students in enabled courses, but the New Gradebook can be currently be turned off at any time if needed. Otherwise, in the future when the New Gradebook is available to all users, the New Gradebook will also allow instructors to manage those labels manually. 

For now we hope this change in the standard Gradebook will help alleviate student concerns about missing assignments.

Thanks!

Erin 

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