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(I just added a proposal to canvas studio; if you are on this thread and would like to see points grading, please vote it up.) ... View more

I have a related issue.  I teach an on-line introductory art history course with a pick-and-choose approach to assignments.  Because of this structure there is no relative weighting of anything: each assignment is worth X number of points, period.  The course contains 1300 points but I grade the course out of 1000 points.     The beauty of the points system is its utter transparency.   And, as one of your other posters noted, I like the ability to easily add extra credit -- which I like to do during the semester to incentivize students to take advantage of relevant opportunities that arise only after the term is underway. At the moment I have established a percentage-based grading scheme but as with the prior posters I find this awkward at best and potentially very confusing to students at worst.  The need to convert to percentages and then to set percentage-based grades is very awkward: 1000 points is an A+ but it is only 78% of the total points available.   I teach a lot of first-term (and first-gen) students and the last thing they need to see is an "F" staring them in the face for the first few months of the term--hence the impracticality of setting ungraded assignments to 0.  Finally, I can't, as my students put it, "kick extra credit our way" once the semester is up and running because, frankly, I can't be recalibrating percentages every time there's a guest speaker in town. Rather than a work around, I would like to ask that Canvas add a second type of grading scheme, one based on a total number of points.  ... View more