Watch a recording of the UO Online/TEP workshop on the Canvas Gradebook.

The Importance of Grading and Feedback 

With the move to remote instruction, both instructors and students are feeling disconnected without the classroom presence and its modes of engagement and immediate feedback. Students may be seeking more guidance and reassurance on their academic performance than they normally would.  

There are many ways you can provide guidance for students, including transparent assignments and expectations, providing examples of student work, utilizing rubrics, and providing consistent feedback. Additionally, providing regular grade updates can help students keep track of their performance. Grades serve as a signpost for students, indicating their progress throughout a term and providing opportunities for course correction.   

In this remote-teaching environment, the Canvas Gradebook and other Canvas grading tools, such as SpeedGrader, can play an essential role in helping students stay on track, by creating additional touchpoints for communication, engagement, and scaffolding.  

Canvas Gradebook Terminology & Quirks 

Canvas Gradebook is a complex tool that can help both instructors and students in tracking progress through a course. Like any system it has a few quirks, but once you learn the nuances of the Gradebook, you’ll be able to manage grades with ease.   

There are two main sources of confusion regarding Canvas’ Gradebook: terminology and how to create Gradebook columns. 

Canvas users quickly learn that understanding the terminology used by the LMS is essential to navigating its quirks. Canvas terminology distinguishes between activities that students do for a grade (called “Assignments” in Canvas) and other learning activities, such as readings, practice quizzes and ungraded discussions (called “Activities/Events” in Canvas) which are not graded. This can be confusing because graded activities often include things done outside of Canvas, such as in-class assignments, quizzes, participation, and attendance. In these instances, the Canvas user will need to manually create an Assignment for these items (but will choose No Submission or On Paper as the submission type) for the item to appear in the Gradebook.   

That brings us to the second source of confusion – adding columns to the Gradebook. Those new to Canvas or those who have used other learning management systems often expect to be able to build a gradebook, column by column, manually. However, the Canvas Gradebook is solely driven by the creation of Assignments, which includes graded Quizzes and Discussions. When a Canvas Assignment (graded) is created, a new column is added to the gradebook. In contrast, when a new Canvas Activity (ungraded) is created, no new column is added to the gradebook. 

Gradebook Overview 

For an overview of general features of the Canvas Gradebook, check out UO Online’s instructions on Using the Canvas Gradebook or Instructure’s extensive How do I use the Gradebook? The following are some specific features that can assist you in navigating the Gradebook.  

Assignment Groups 

When setting up a Canvas Gradebook, the first task a user should undertake is setting up Assignment Groups on the Assignment Index Page (“Assignments” on the Course Navigation Menu). These are categories of assignments, such as papers, quizzes, problem sets, etc., that are used for organizational purposes, and are particularly important if using Weighted Grades or if you want to apply Rules.  Assignment Groups and Assignments are created separately, but once you have created Assignment Groups you can move Assignments into the different groups.  

Weighted Grades 

We often want to apply weights or percentages to areas of our class (i.e., Participation 10%, Homework Sets 10%, Midterm Exams 40%, Final Exam 40%). You can have Canvas automatically calculate weighted grades in just a few clicks: on the Assignment Index page, click the Options icon (the three dots), select Assignment Group Weight, then enter the percentages for each Assignment Group. Visit the Canvas Guides for an in-depth explanation of weighting grades. 

Applying Rules 

Once you have added assignments to your assignment group, you can create rules for the entire assignment group, which determine how Canvas handles any exceptions you want to create for grade calculations. There are three grading rules you can apply: 1) Drop (ignore) the lowest # scores for each student, 2) Drop (ignore) the highest # scores for each student, and 3) Never drop a specific assignment.  

Grade Posting Policy 

There are two ways to post grades using the Grade Posting Policy: Automatic Posting and Manual Posting. These policies can be applied at the course level and at the assignment level. For more detailed instructions, read Best Practices for using Canvas’ Grade Posting Policy.  

Applying Extra Credit 

Extra credit is handled differently for a weighted Gradebook and an unweighted Gradebook. For a weighted Gradebook, users should create an extra credit Assignment Group with a weight greater than 0% and an Assignment worth more than 0 points. All the Assignment Groups plus the extra credit group will now weigh more than 100% in total. (i.e., Participation 10%, Homework Sets 10%, Midterm Exams 40%, Final Exam 40%, Extra Credit 5%. Notice that the first 4 assignment groups total to 100%. This ensures that any assignment placed within the extra credit Assignment Group will have either a positive or neutral effect on students’ overall grade.) For an unweighted gradebook, users should create an Assignment worth 0 points. Any extra points given in this column will be added to the total points for the course.  

Gradebook History 

The Canvas Gradebook allows users to look at the history of students’ grades, which can help an instructor track how a particular student’s grade for a column has changed over time, as well as showing which grader made changes to a grade. This can be used to immediately retrieve grades in the case of an error. To access the Gradebook History, select this option from the Gradebook dropdown menu.  

Muting Grades 

When an instructor enters a grade into the Gradebook, students are notified automatically. Some students, however, are prone to panic if they find that their classmates have received a grade on an Assignment but they have not. Instructors can opt to release the grades for an Assignment all at once by clicking on the Visibility Icon (when visible, it looks like an eye and when not visible, it has a line through the eye.)  

Anonymous Grading 

For those who wish to reduce bias in grading, or for schools whose accrediting body requires it such as the School of Law, Canvas allows an instructor to opt–in to Anonymous Grading. This can be toggled on in Settings under the Feature Options tab. This can also be enabled on a per-assignment basis in SpeedGrader.   

Rubrics  

Rubrics are a tool that can help instructors grade faster and more objectively. They also show students what criteria they will be graded on. UO Online recommends using Rubrics to grade Assignments and Discussion Boards. In an Assignment, users can add a Rubric by clicking + Rubric within the created Assignment. In Discussions, Rubrics are found by clicking the Options icon (the three dots).  For more information on creating and using Rubrics for grading and feedback please see Rubrics and Outcomes.   

Features to Improve Grading Efficiency 

• Default Grades – Quickly apply a default grade if students are all receiving the same grade on an Assignment or set the default as 0 for students who didn’t submit.  
• Filtering by sections for large classes
• Individual View – Allows users to assess one student and one assignment at a time if needed. This is also where users can find certain statistics for an assignment: Avg Score, High Score, Low Score.
  

Using SpeedGrader 

SpeedGrader allows you to view and grade student assignment submissions in one interface. Users can view student submissions in the browser without having to download student work to your computer (although that is an option). Grades entered in the SpeedGrader interface are automatically recorded in the Gradebook.  

Per Canvas documentation, instructors can use SpeedGrader to: 

• Sort submissions by student and hide student names for anonymous grading 
• View submission details for each student, including resubmitted assignments 
• Use rubrics to assign grades
• Leave feedback for your students
• Track your grading progress and hide assignments while grading
• View submissions in moderated assignments
  

To learn more about SpeedGrader, watch the SpeedGrader Overview video.  

Providing Feedback 

Meaningful feedback is essential to effective online teaching and learning, but it has taken on a greater import during these extraordinary times where students are already struggling with feelings of isolation and lack of connection. Not only does feedback provide guidance, encouragement, and correction, but it helps establish teaching presence and creates a sense of connection between an instructor and students. However an instructor decides to provide feedback to students, the Canvas grading tools can help. 

SpeedGrader makes it easy for instructors to provide feedback to students, whether on an assignment, quiz, or graded discussion. Graders can give feedback in a variety of ways: text, audio, video, file upload, and annotations. These robust feedback tools give instructors a great opportunity to make connections with students and deliver meaningful instruction.  

UO instructors are making great use of these tools: 

An instructor in the School of Music and Dance uses the Media Recorder in SpeedGrader to provide video feedback to her students by setting up a webcam over her piano to demonstrate proper keyboard skills.  

A professor of French uses the Media Recorder to provide an audio recording of the correct pronunciation of words when leaving feedback comments on her student’s video submissions.  

A Legal Research & Writing instructor in the School of Law uses the annotation feature in the DocViewer to provide line-by-line feedback and correction on student’s legal briefs.  

To provide a sense of connection, a professor in the Department of Anthropology uploads video recordings of himself giving feedback on students’ work rather than typing a response.  

The Gradebook offers features like “Message students who” to send Canvas emails to students who meet a certain criteria, like those who have not submitted an Assignment, in order to provide guidance. 

The four categories of students you can message using this feature are: 

• Students who haven’t submitted yet 
• Students who haven’t been graded yet 
• Students who scored less than a particular score 
• Students who scored more than a particular score
  

Instructors can email any individual student from the Gradebook by clicking their name, then clicking the mail icon in the information window on the right. This window also displays information on each student such as how many late or missing assignments they have, a comparison of their participation to the rest of class, and analytics on their activity. By utilizing these tools, instructors can craft specific feedback for students about their overall performance in the course.  

 

Authors

Bailey Dobbs, Instructional Designer, UO Online
Karen Matson, Instructional Technologist, UO Online
Megan Tucker, Instructional Designer, UO Online 

Contact Us 

For further assistance with the Canvas Gradebook, UO Online & Canvas Support is available remotely. Please contact us: 

• By Phone at (541) 346-1942 
• By email at uoonline@uoregon.edu 
• Chat at livehelp.uoregon.edu  
• UO Service Portal at service.uoregon.edu