Good morning,
Midterm grade submissions are drawing near, and so I wanted to share some information on the Grades page today. Not only can you make sure your grades are calculating correctly, you can also send messages to students, excuse work, and post grades.
To start, the Grades page takes in information from the assignments page. If an assignment is set up to be ungraded, then it won’t appear on this page. That means that if an assignment does show up, you may need to go into settings to make that change.
If an assignment is graded but you’ve set it up not to affect students’ final grades, then you’ll see an icon denoting that. It will also show up on students’ individual grades pages with this note:
Individual student’s grade pages are useful for troubleshooting grades that don’t seem right. For example, when you scroll to the bottom of their page, does there seem to be too many points? This can help you find out if an assignment is accidentally being counted, such as Roll Call Attendance.
Access the student’s page by clicking on their name in Grades, then clicking the Grades button.
On the main Grades page, you can see if a grading scheme is applied to your course by scrolling to the total and looking for letter grades. If there isn’t one, then a grading scheme isn’t active. To add a grading scheme, you’ll need to go to Settings from the main course menu, then scroll down to check the box that reads “Enable course grading scheme”:
Note that the grading scheme is enabled for the basic, ten-point undergraduate letter grade scale.
There are several grading schemes that have been added, some for divisional or departmental grading. There is also a ten-point scale used by many courses. If you need to make individual adjustments and can’t, please reach out to me for help!
On Grades, you can excuse student work by typing in “EX” for their grade. This will remove that item from their final grade calculations. Likewise, you can usually make direct adjustments in the gradebook by typing in the numbers in the cells. Two times this might not work is with third-party tools (i.e., MindTap, MyLab, and the like) or with quizzes that auto-grade.
When you type “EX,” it becomes “Excused”!
For some assignments, they may be set up with “manual” posting. This means that grades will not be shared with students until you release them, even if you’ve given some students a grade. This is a great setting for big projects where you might want to do a curve—or to make sure you don’t accidentally send a notification that they’ve been graded as “10” instead of “100” if you make a typo.
If you see “MANUAL” by an assignment’s name, this setting is in effect. To share, you’ll need to click the three dots and go to “Post grades”:
If you want to set up an assignment to be manually graded, you can make that change from this menu for an individual assignment by clicking “Grade Posting Policy.” Otherwise, you can make all assignments manually graded by going to the Gradebook Settings menu by clicking the gear icon at the top right of the Grades page, then clicking “Grade Posting Policy”:
On the Grades page, you can filter assignments by various options: modules, status, etc. One helpful thing to do before midterm grading is to filter by “Missing” to see which students have missing work and might need to either be messaged or given a zero:
I clicked “Apply Filters” to find the “Missing” status, and it showed missing work.
If needed, once you have the missing work showing on your screen, you can then click the three dots by the assignment’s name, then message all students with missing work:
This menu is nice because it also allows you to contact students who have scored a certain grade. You can reach out about resubmission options or make-up work. All messaging is done through the Canvas Inbox, and if they reply, you’ll receive their messages on that page.
I suggest spending a bit of time going through your Grades page prior to midterm grades, looking at the point values and making sure that everyone’s grades are accounted for. Be sure to add a grading scheme as needed as well.
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