Weighing the Grades

[pacheco]

Sirs: I am trying to understand how CANVAS weighs the grades. For example, the quizzes (or the average of them) will weigh 30% of the total grade, 20% midterm I, 20% midterm II, and 30% the Final Exam. What is the best way to incorporate those percentages to get to the final grades for the students? 

The quizzes are already in progress: we will have Quiz 5 today. Can, after this Quiz 5, I average all five and weigh the results already? 

Thanks so much for the attention and time. 

Regards,
Carlos Pacheco, Ph.D.
---------------------------------
NMR Senior University Lecturer
NJIT/Chemistry and Environmental Science
Tiernan Hall - Rm. B008 (office); B006 (NMR lab)
Newark, NJ 07102
Emails: pacheco@njit.edu; carlos.n.pacheco@njit.edu;
cpacheco223@gmail.com
Ph# (office): 973-596-6534; (lab): 973-596-6551;
(m) 609-240-5957

[nwilson7]

Hello  @pacheco ‌, if I am fully understanding, there is not a way to do this currently in Canvas.  You can have weights where like quizzes is 30% of the overall grade but you can't then have sub weights.  There are some work arounds if you want to do some math and/or know the total amount of points that will end up being in your course.  I have pasted the answer to a similar question below that helps explain this method.

Unique Grade Book Setup 

Hope that helps!

-Nick

[pacheco]

Thanks, Nick -- so there is no way to weigh the assignments in CANVAS? For example; if the average of all quizzes for one student is 80 points (out of 100), which are 30% of the final grade, then I need to export the gradebook onto Excel, for example, and calculate 80*0.3 to obtain his/her final grade due to quizzes? Is this also the way for midterms and finals? I probably could have set the quizzes to 30 points, maybe I did a mistake. But I wouldn't have the option to average these quizzes still, is my interpretation right?

Thanks  so much for your input! 

Best Wishes,

Carlos Pacheco

(CES)

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @pacheco  

You can most certainly weight grades is Canvas, and this is accomplished by placing graded activities (assignments, quizzes and graded discussions) into assignment groups, then weighting the groups. Learn more at How do I weight the final course grade based on assignment groups? 

What  @nwilson7  is saying is that you cannot weight them in the manner you described in your original question. You could create an assignment group for your quizzes, and weight them at 30% of your grade; but then within that assignment group, you cannot weight the individual quizzes as a percentage of that assignment group.

The discussion that Nick pointed you to has a few work-rounds that might get you there.

Kelley

[James · Accepted solution]

I'm not reading this the same way as the others. It sounds like they're taking something very simple and trying to make it difficult. I'm probably missing something. I don't see that he's wanting to weight the grades within the quiz category, it sounds like he's wanting to count the average of the quiz category as 30% of the overall class grade.

It sounds like a straight-forward weighted gradebook, which is described in the Canvas Instructor Guide lesson that Kelley linked to: How do I weight the final course grade based on assignment groups? 

One tricky thing may be that the average of the quizzes is based on the number of points, not the number of quizzes. The average is the total number of points scored on all of the quizzes divided by the number of points possible. It is not the number of points scored divided by the number of quizzes. If the quizzes all have the same number of points, the math comes out the same.

Another potential issue is that until you have grades in a category, it will exclude that category from your score for the class.

• If the only thing you have right now are quiz scores, then the class grade would show 80%.
• If you have an 80% quiz average and a 60% midterm I score, then your grade will be (80*30%+60*20%)/(30%+20%) = 72%. The midterm II and final won't figure into the grades at all until there is a score for them.

Most people want it this way, but there are some who want to say those students have 80*30%+60*20%=36 points towards the overall grade in the course. If that's the case, then that professor would need to enter 0's for the other groups.