Show how late an assignment is in SpeedGrader

(1)

 

Currently, if a student submits an assessment at what appears to be the exact due date and time, they are penalised (unless the individual penalty is overridden by staff). So far as the student is aware (and staff for that matter) the assessment is on time.

 

For example, the below shows that a student submitted a paper on May 4 at 1700hrs. This is the due day and time, but a late penalty has been applied (per the late policy). After calling Canvas support, I found out that the student actually submitted at 17:00:04... four seconds after the due date. However, this information is not visible to the students or staff, so for the student it looks like the a penalty has been applied unfairly. For staff, they cannot verify if it is a glitch, or the student has submitted within that one-minute time frame. Many students submit up until the last minute, so this is something that is bound to happen often. 

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I suggest one of the following changes are made to fix this issue:

  1. Allow seconds to be entered in the assessment due date and time (i.e. 4 May 2018 at 17:00:59 etc.); or
  2. Display the submission date including seconds, not just down to the minute (visible to students and staff); or
  3. Have a field that lists how late the assessment is (our previous system did this, it would state '1 day 20 hours late' etc.).
32 Comments
jbuchner
Community Contributor

And after all that, it turns out, in Canvas, sometimes 11:59 did equal 11:59:59, or 11:59:00 if you edited an assignment, but now the "bug" is fixed. so, now 11:59 is always 11:59:59.

d_b_r_a_fokkema
Community Novice

I'm flabbergasted by Canvas's default behaviour. I click on the little calendar to pick a due date and Canvas automatically suggests 11:59 pm (or 23:59). That reads as "just before midnight" which is exactly what I intended, so   . But now my students are marked late whenever they submit *just* before midnight. This is insane. I cannot comprehend that anyone would set a deadline for 11:59 pm and would actually *want* submissions to be marked late at 11:59:01 pm. Nice that it is documented somewhere, but that does not help me or my students. Above, someone pointed to the release notes (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-15415-canvas-release-notes-2018-09-15#jive_content_id_Assig... ) but that seems to indicate that this problem is now fixed? How can I figure out if this version is rolled out to my institution? Or is everyone always on the latest version?

bkenney
Community Explorer

This issue persists at my university. One of my students submitted an assignment at 11:59pm last night and it was marked Late. She was confused and emailed me to ask why. 

If I modify my assignment due dates to midnight the next day, the assignments will then show incorrectly on the Canvas Calendar.

cjjudge
Community Novice

Since this thread has more views than another related topic, I'd like to draw everyone's attention to this idea too: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12886-due-date-turn-in-date-on-same-screen-speedgrader-ipad 

Showing the Due Date information instead of just "Late" in Speedgrader would be really helpful. My personal teaching style is to allow grace periods for late assignments (I set the due date for the end of the day, but since I won't be grading till the next day they have until 8am before I'll actually apply a penalty) so the seconds issue isn't a problem for me! 

But, I may have a few students who have been given different due dates from the rest of the class to allow for extensions and it can be difficult to remember who I granted an extension to. Since late deductions increase for each day late, I'm apt to apply an unfairly steep penalty to a student who submitted late after an extension if I don't recall that the original due date didn't apply to that student. 

Alternatively, if Speedgrader showed "how late an assignment is"--such as 8 hours, or 30 seconds, or 1:20:03 (hrs:min:sec) it would accomplish the same thing for me. 

klink
Community Explorer

Adding information about *how* late a submission is uploaded will be especially useful when some students are granted an extension, but then they turn in a late assignment based on the extended due date. Not sure if this is only my institution's implementation of Canvas, but I got caught by this and applied a full late penalty to the student, not remembering that I'd granted an extension (which reduced the late penalty substantially). If the LATE sticker at the top in SpeedGrader just said how late, based on the student's assigned due date, I could easily have avoided this mistake.

c_murphy
Community Participant

It is the granting of extensions that makes hand-in date and time in speedgrader such a  good idea. Our instructors want to know each student's due date in case they were granted an individual extension, because the 'late' hand-in for a student with an extension may only be an inconsequential minute or two rather than a serious matter for those with no extension granted. Right now tutors have to go into the assignment settings to view due date information which is a pain.

pmacknamara
Community Novice

It is not enough to simply change the time to include the 59 seconds of each minute. 

We apply a penalty of 10% per day that work is overdue. I need the system to record the number of days overdue the work is. At the moment, when I look at speedgrader I can't see the due date. As I teach multiple classes I have to look up the due date for each student's work to see how late it is. This cannot be difficult to program and I wonder why it has not already been done. 

Jess_M
Community Participant

If you enable the New Gradebook (currently in Beta) you can set up your unit so that a late penalty is automatically applied to late submissions (a late submission policy). You can set whatever percentage you would like (ours is 5%).

This is why it is important to show how late an assessment, so the students can see why they were penalised. 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13948-73553826329 

p_a_watt
Community Novice

Saying due before doesn't fix the problem. If you want the deadline to be up to the end of the day - say 10 March, then saying 11.59 on doesn't achieve this as Canvas marks 11.59.01 and onwards as late. A correct solution is to make the software work as a servant to humans not require humans to work in a nerdy way for the convenience of software authors. 

Marisa_Rickel
Community Participant

I think this is necessary now during COVID more than ever. With many students having extensions for being out sick, students in blended models, schedules being different across schools I think having adding a section next to the Late status in speedgrader for how late it was (it already does this in the student card in gradebook) or when that student's due date was. How late would be preferable though. 

chike424
Community Explorer

Anonymous time stamp. When students submit an assignment it will be essential to show all time stamp including seconds. To determine how late and when late penalty can be overlooked.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
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