Deleting rubrics

[lwestman]

How can I delete rubrics from past courses?  When I am choosing a rubric for my current classes, I see all of the rubrics from past courses.  I tried deleting the rubrics I was not using, but it only deletes the ones for that specific course. When I then go to "find rubric" for that course, I still see all of the ones from previous courses. Here are a couple of screen shots. The first one is the rubrics for the course I am currently working on, and the second is what I see when I select "find rubric" to put it in the discussion forum.

Thanks!

Rene'e

[James]

 @lwestman ,

You cannot delete rubrics from past courses if they were used for an assignment in that course.

If I understand you correctly, you are

1. In an assignment and going to "find a rubric",
2. selecting the current course,
3. and seeing rubrics that shouldn't be there because you're not using them in the current course.

If this happens, it is possibly crud left over from a course import. 

• You may be using them in the current course but you may not be aware of it. Most likely, you copied the content into this course from another course and there was an assignment that used it. You may not be using it this semester, the assignment might be unpublished, but the rubric is still attached to something so it carried over.
• You may have deleted the assignment that was using it, but the rubric remains.
• This may not have happened this semester, the crud might be left over from previous semesters.

To remove rubrics that you don't need, go to Outcomes and click on Manage Rubrics. There you will get a list of all of the rubrics used in the course. I see 4 for my course this semester, although I'm only using 2 of them in active, published assignments. The rest are crud left over from assignments I'm keeping but am not using this term.

If you click on one of those, then you get the option to delete the rubric. When you click that, it will come up with a warning box:

Are you sure you want to delete this rubric? This action will remove this rubric association from all assignments in the current course, and delete any existing associated assessments.

That warning sounds ominous, but the "associated assessments" refers to completed rubrics, not the assignments themselves. See Assessments Disappear If Rubric Deleted?  for more information.

If you would like to know whether a rubric is really being used or not before you delete it, there is a check that you can do using an API call.

Let's say I click on my Discussion Rubric. I get a URL in my browser's location bar that looks like this (the host has been removed): 

/courses/2610710/rubrics/1717885

I'm going to modify that pathname to call the API. Add /api/v1 in front and ?include[]=assignment_associations at the end. You may want to paste the entire URL from Canvas into a new tab so you don't lose your place and then modify it. When done, hit enter to load the page.

/api/v1/courses/2610710/rubrics/1717885?include[]=assignment_associations

It will look like junk in the browser, but at the end will be an "associations" property.

If there is anything other than an empty set of brackets [ ] after "associations", then the rubric is associated with something and you may want to check out what it is before you delete it.

If you want to make the output easier to read, select everything except for the while(1); at the beginning (start with the left brace) and copy it. Then go to an online JSON formatter and paste the code in there.

I get something like this. I've truncated parts of it for readability, it was quite long.

{
  "id":1717885,
  "context_id":2610710,
  "context_type":"Course",
  "data":[
// the actual rubric is here
 ],
  "points_possible":10.5,
  "title":"Discussion Rubric",
  "reusable":false,
  "public":false,
  "read_only":true,
  "free_form_criterion_comments":false,
  "hide_score_total":false,
  "associations":[
    {
      "id":3757488,
      "rubric_id":1717885,
      "association_id":24003058,
      "association_type":"Assignment",
      "use_for_grading":true,
      "summary_data":null,
      "purpose":"grading",
      "hide_score_total":false,
      "hide_points":false,
      "hide_outcome_results":false
    },
// more of these associations
 ]
}‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

The associations section is what you're after. Here I haven an association_type of Assignment and an association_id of 24003058. That means the assignment with the ID of 24003058 is the one using it.

On the other hand, if I click on the Make a Map Review, I get the pathname in the browser location bar of

/courses/2610710/rubrics/1717888

When I modify that to add the necessary components to make it an API call, I open this page

/api/v1/courses/2610710/rubrics/1717888?include[]=assignment_associations

In this case, it was easy to tell. The browser page ended with

"associations":[]}

That's an empty association since it has the empty brackets (an empty array), so I know the rubric isn't used anywhere and it's safe to delete.

[Shar]

Hi Rene'e,

James did not promote his own Canvancement: Sorting the Find a Rubric dialog  which will definitely cut down on the number of rubrics showing up in your Find a Rubric dialog box. :smileygrin: I've had this canvancement installed on my browser for so long that I forget what it's like to see a flood of rubrics as shown in your screenshot 7.46.14 PM.png.

The browser script will significantly change your life. Here's a picture from the explanation document:

Notice the term that appears on the line with the number of rubrics, so helpful!

From the document, here's the quick install steps and do them in order by clicking on the links:

1. Install a browser add-on: Tampermonkey
2. Install the Find Rubric Sorter user script.

There are so many goodies on the Canvancements - Canvas Enhancements  page, including Importing Rubrics and Reorder Rubric Criteria. Have a look and see what other goodies will save you time.

Hope the Canvancement helps,
Cheers - Shar

[James]

ishar-uw, I started to mention that, but it wouldn't directly answer the question about how to delete rubrics so I took it out. It is a huge timesaver, though.

[Shar]

I've grown so used to having the Sorting & Importing Rubrics scripts installed that I only ever delete rubrics when I've completely botched the rubric with the wrong criteria.

I interpreted the original post as a request to clean up the list of rubrics to choose from and I know that's when I first turned to the Sorting Rubrics script and I haven't looked back. When I got a new work computer, the first thing I did was install the timesaving scripts in my "work" browser.

Happy Monday!

Shar