Canvas grading question

[Hegemony]

Here's what I want to set up. There are six assignments, and students choose any four. They are all worth equal points. I want Canvas to know that there should only be four assignments completed, and not give the students a 0 if they don't turn in an assignment that week. I don't want Canvas to drop the lowest grades, because I don't want to have the students do all six, and me grade all six, when only four are going to count.

Is there a way to set this up?  I have read Canvas help pages until I'm blue in the face, and I can't figure it out.

If there's not a way to set this up, can I maybe set it up so they do 5 out of the 6? 

Argh.

[Caracal]

Here's what I want to set up. There are six assignments, and students choose any four. They are all worth equal points. I want Canvas to know that there should only be four assignments completed, and not give the students a 0 if they don't turn in an assignment that week. I don't want Canvas to drop the lowest grades, because I don't want to have the students do all six, and me grade all six, when only four are going to count.

Is there a way to set this up?  I have read Canvas help pages until I'm blue in the face, and I can't figure it out.

If there's not a way to set this up, can I maybe set it up so they do 5 out of the 6? 

Argh.

Yes, more or less. There are two ways I've been able to do this, but neither is perfect.

You can change the grade settings so that not completing an assignment is not automatically a zero. Then the assignment is just not counted if the student doesn't do it. That will, however, mean you'll have to manually put in a zero for other non completed assignments, which might be annoying if you have a lot of automatically graded assignments.

The other option is to just manually change the zeros to blanks on the gradesheet for the first two assignments the student misses. You just have to be careful to recheck this so you don't mess it up. And either way, you'll just have to remind the students a lot to only do four and that you won't grade any after that.

[mamselle]

Would it be simpler to either just count the 4 highest scores, and put in a 0.001 value for the zeroes....

or.....oh, I know....

I did mine in Excel, created a formula for all the affected cells that set 0 = 0.001, then exported the Excel file to the LMS. Then my last cell would subtract the 0.002 overage and divide by 4 to get the average.

Since I also do a buncha tricky things like having a running second comments line under each student's name for exceptions, reminders to myself, etc. I always use Excel first, then cut and paste the pertinent lines to another sheet (or save the basic sheet and blow away the alternate lines on the second sheet) once I've checked everything.

The I copy and paste the final Excel file into the CMS.

But I've usually done that just for classes <20 total; with more you could still just do the formula trick, I think.

M.

[Caracal]

I realize I might have been a bit unclear. If an assignment has a blank on the Canvas grading system it won't count in either the numerator or denominator. So, you can have assignments that are "blank" and it won't mess anything up. You'll just have to either manually add zeros in if students don't complete four assignments, or alternatively, manually take two of them out.

[mythbuster]

I have assignments like Hegemony describes (complete one of the following 5 choices). There is no "clean" way to do this is Canvas Grade book. Your choices are either essentially what Caracal described. There are downsides to both approaches.
   If you leave the other assignments as "blank" grades, you need to explain how this works to your students. You will have nervous nellie students who will email in panic over the blank columns in the grade book. You will also have those who complete more that the desired number of assignments and these you will need to void out (if they auto-grade). This is the system that I use. It works well in terms of the grade calculations, but I do have to post multiple statements to students who freak out over how it appears to them in the grade book.
   The alternative is to set up a designated grade category, auto-assign zeros to those not completed by the due date, and then program the system to drop the extra assignments. Depending on how your grade categories are set up, this may not be feasible or desirable.

[darkstarrynight]

This is not a great idea by any means, but you could create different assignment groupings of four and students are proceed with the group that has the four they choose. This would require you to have every combination of four assignments though, which sounds like too much work probably. I am just brainstorming.

[the_geneticist]

Can you keep track of completion in a hidden column just for you?  Type in 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 for how many the student has finished.  Then, once a student has submitted 4 assignments, mark the other 2 as "exempt".  That feature means that the exempt column isn't added to their total points possible (e.g. student is graded out of 4 * 10 = 40 points, exempt from 20 points, grade is calculated out of 40 possible points).  Not sure if that's less work, but at least it doesn't mess up the rest of the assignment settings in the grade book the way that blanks or zeros can.

[Parasaurolophus]

Yes, more or less. There are two ways I've been able to do this, but neither is perfect.

You can change the grade settings so that not completing an assignment is not automatically a zero. Then the assignment is just not counted if the student doesn't do it. That will, however, mean you'll have to manually put in a zero for other non completed assignments, which might be annoying if you have a lot of automatically graded assignments.

The other option is to just manually change the zeros to blanks on the gradesheet for the first two assignments the student misses. You just have to be careful to recheck this so you don't mess it up. And either way, you'll just have to remind the students a lot to only do four and that you won't grade any after that.

I realize I might have been a bit unclear. If an assignment has a blank on the Canvas grading system it won't count in either the numerator or denominator. So, you can have assignments that are "blank" and it won't mess anything up. You'll just have to either manually add zeros in if students don't complete four assignments, or alternatively, manually take two of them out.

Yeah, this seems like the easiest way of accomplishing it to me. You should also be able to set the system to drop the two lowest marks for a particular assignment, so you wouldn't have to worry about it auto-filling the zeroes. You might get students over-submitting, but you could just mark the first four that show up.

Alternately, you could set up one submission folder for all of the assignments and set it to only accept four submissions.

[Hegemony]

In case anyone cares, I found a simpler way to do this:

1. Create an Assignment Group, and slide all the applicable assignments into it.
2. Click on Edit, and it will give you a box asking how many of the "lowest grade" assignments to drop. Click the relevant number.

Then the uncompleted assignments will get a 0, and the system will ignore them.

So I think — I hope — that solved it.

Thanks, all.

[downer]

How often do you find that you fashion your grading policies so that it is simple (or even just possible) to calculate using the LMS grade function? I find that I'm starting to do that. I used to make Discussions worth different numbers of points depending on how difficult they were, but since I'm dropping the lowest one, that got too complicated.

[Caracal]

In case anyone cares, I found a simpler way to do this:

1. Create an Assignment Group, and slide all the applicable assignments into it.
2. Click on Edit, and it will give you a box asking how many of the "lowest grade" assignments to drop. Click the relevant number.

Then the uncompleted assignments will get a 0, and the system will ignore them.

So I think — I hope — that solved it.

Thanks, all.

Yes, just remember to set it so that uncompleted automatically get a zero. And remind students to not do more than four, and then you'll have to make sure nobody did when you grade them so it doesn't turn into a drop the lowest score situation.