Canvas Gradebook: Assignments equally (or proportionally) weighted?

[sean_flaherty]

I'm curious how many of you (or your colleagues) would like to see a feature added to the Canvas Gradebook that would allow you to easily weight assignments equally (or proportionally) regardless of the number of points.  Personally, this would make my life easier.  Also, I've found 4 different Feature Ideas recently which are essentially asking for this although each idea is coming from a slightly different point of view.  Unfortunately, the Feature Ideas that have come up for voting in the past have all fallen short of the 100 votes required to move the feature along in the development process.

Perhaps you have a homework group in your gradebook and you'd like all of those assignments to be weighed equally in your gradebook even though each assignment can have different point values... does that sound like something you'd like?

Maybe within that homework group, you want to reward students who did well on a really tough assignment by weighing it twice as much as one of the other assignments even though it may have had the same or fewer points when you graded it... is that a feature you would use?

Maybe if/when you give exams, you'd like to simple let the test be out of how many points the test is out of instead of playing with the points so they work out nicely (50 points, 100 points, etc).  You could have a test that was out of 45 weighed the same as a test that was out of 62 weighed the same as a test that was out of 51... or have your final exam weighed more heavily even though it only had 61 points when you graded it.

Right now, everybody I know that wants to weigh assignments equally or proportionally within their gradebook has to play with the numbers, perform various calculations outside of Canvas (likely on a spreadsheet students don't have access to), and then plug in the new calculated values into Canvas.  The numbers lose a bit of meaning to the students this way and it's burdensome for the instructors.

Anyhow, I'm just trying to find out how many people would benefit from this feature or something like it so that I can rally the troops, so to speak, to make sure we get enough votes in the future.  Every other online gradebook I have used in the past has had this feature and I'd really like to see it developed in Canvas.

Thanks.

Sean

I

[clong]

Hi Sean,

I think you've explained the rationale for this perfectly and if this was an active Feature Idea, I'd vote for it on the spot and I'd even campaign for it and commit to finding at least 10 other Canvas users to vote for it. I really think you should submit this as an idea, and when you do please be sure to place a link to it here so anyone that is following this discussion will be able to quickly go to this idea and vote for it.

[sean_flaherty]

The link above is a current feature idea that just opened for voting on January 6 - please consider supporting it.  I have tried to piggyback on this idea and add in the "out of" vs "worth" functionality.  If we're able to get the 100 votes on that idea, I hope the Instructure developers consider what I (and others) have suggested.

Sean

[Stef_retired]

Hi  @sean_flaherty , I just discovered that you've posted this identical discussion twice in at least two different groups. Did you know that you can share a post in more than one community space? Rather than creating two copies with differing comment threads, you can create your post and then use the Share link in the upper right to share it into additional spaces. Because you are a member of the Higher Education group, for example, you can ask a question in the Start a Discussion/Question... area of that group, and then share it into another group, such as the K-12​ group here. That unifies the conversation in a single thread.

So, I'm going to post the link to the parallel discussion currently underway in the Higher Education group: Canvas Gradebook - Assignments equally and/or proportionally weighted? I recommend that you lock one of them for further participation and direct people to the other one to eliminate the need for double posting.

[sean_flaherty]

Thanks, Stephanie.  I'm pretty new at this so I'm not quite sure how it all works.  I had also thought I could try to wrangle some support in each group in case the needs discussed for K12 and Higher Ed were a little different and then merge the two later but joining the two now is fine, too.

I appreciate all the guidance, Stephanie... and the support for the ideas.