How does drop lowest grade work?

u6032171
Community Explorer

Does it just go by a percentage?  Right now, I have some assignments that are worth slightly different total points.  And dropping the lowest assignment by percentage will not necessarily be the assignment that a student would choose to optimize their score.  As an extreme example, suppose a student currently has a 90% out of 1000pts.  They submit two assignments.  On one, they get 1/2 pts, and on the other they get 700/1000 pts.  Ostensibly, on the 1/2 assignment, they got 50%, so a naive assignment dropping algorithm would drop that grade (since they got a 70% on the other one).  However, if they drop the 1/2, they end up with an 80% in the class, whereas if they drop the 700/1000, they end up with an 89.92%.

If "by percent score" is how the algorithm works, is there any way to override this behavior manually?  How can I specify the correct assignment to drop, as opposed to letting Canvas choose?

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