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Hi Christine, Why would this assignment need to be published in the middle of the class? Why would it not be published at the beginning of the course along with everything else, so that the date for the exam shows up in the calendar and syllabus? I'm defintiely not trying to rile things up here, I'm just trying to understand the situation you're envisioning! ... View more

Hi Rephael, I think I would disagree with you on that point. I think Canvas treats any activity that students complete for a grade as an "assignment." It may come down to semantics with some of these things, but I think Canvas's approach is that anything the students are doing in the course should have a place in Canvas. The on-paper submission option for assignments isn't a work around for this use case; It's purpose is exactly for this kind of case, where a student is turning something in in class, whether it's an exam, paper, etc., but their grade is still being recorded in Canvas. ... View more

Hi Christine, For this use case, I'm wondering what the issue is with having an assignment associated with a grade column that might be for something like a paper test. Since assignments have an option to be established as an on-paper submission, wouldn't that make sense to have that assignment associated with that grade column, in which you could add a due date and instructions for that on-paper submission? ... View more

I agree with some of the previous comments. This ability caused issues in a previous LMS for which I ran our training program. When assignments and columns in the gradebook can be created separately, this creates the potential for there to be a mismatch between the assignments and the grades in the gradebook. That means that when you're building your course you have to check and re-check to make sure that the assignments and their corresponding gradebook columns match up. As other said, this can create a lot of headaches and, for us, led to a lot of support issues where there were mismatches. When gradebook columns and assignments are linked together, this issue is avoided completely. It sounds like the reasoning here is to be able to create placeholder assignments quickly, but I agree with what was said above, that assignments do not take very long to create. If folks are pushing for a button to create items in the gradebook directly, I think that could be a helpful feature, but when that column is created it should create a corresponding assignment, and could even pop up a window that would allow you to put some particulars about that assignment right there in the gradebook so that assignments can be created quickly. ... View more