Canvas - Course-Level Assessment Configuration

Most of Canvas’s grading setup happens at the assessment level, but there are a number of settings available at the gradebook level, as well as some higher-level settings that govern assignment grouping and scheduling.

The primary concepts behind Canvas grading configuration are:

Assignments - Graded content
Grading schemes - Labels assigned to grade percentages
Grading periods - Periods in which content can be graded
Assignment groups - Categories that group assignments together

Canvas calls all graded content Assignments, and non-graded content Activities, with the exception of the “Not Graded” assignment, which is an assignment that does not contribute to the learner’s final grade. This will be discussed in greater depth in the Assessment Setup section for Canvas.

As shown above, grades can be displayed in the gradebook as points, percentages, complete/incomplete, a letter grade, or a GPA scale, though these are entirely arbitrary, much like Moodle. These grading schemes (as they are termed) can be created at the course-level or at the site-level to be used by courses, and if a course uses a site-level grading scheme, the courses are linked to that scheme, meaning that they cannot change the grading scheme unless they have permission to change it for all courses. These simply designate labels that are given to final grades of a certain level, with no inherent meaning.

Grading periods are date ranges in which assignment grades are aggregated, aimed primarily at academic years - for example Winter 2022 vs. Spring 2023. These can be defined at the account or site level, or at the course level. Each grading period is made up of three properties:

Start date
End date
Close date

The gradebook filters current assignments by the grading periods based on their due date. So in the above example, where the end date of “Quarter 1” is set to Nov 11, 2016, an assignment due in October would be automatically categorised as being part of Quarter 1. This is effectively the only role the start and end date have from the grading period - the start and end dates do not inherently affect the Assignments, which have their own start and end dates, but those dates serve to group assignments into the relevant grading periods. After the close date is met on a grading period, instructors cannot edit the grades of assignments, and cannot modify quiz submissions, effectively locking instructors out of all grade management tools for assignments set within that grading period.

Assignment Groups are a way of categorising assignments, similar to Assignment Types in Open edX, or Grade Categories in Moodle. Unlike Open edX, assignment groups are optional. They allow all users to filter the gradebook display by the assignment group to see how they’re doing in each assignment assigned to that group, and allow staff to apply weights to each assignment group in order to adjust how each group applies to the final grade.

Assignment groups can optionally be given Rules, which are extra settings that will be applied to the group as a whole. These rules are based around which assignments to drop. Unlike Open edX, Canvas has more control over these rather than simply drop lowest:

Dropped scores:
- # to drop of lowest scores
- # to drop of highest scores
Never drop:
- Assignment picker

The following is an excerpt from their documentation around how grade-dropping works, as it is complex in Canvas:

Canvas considers how the rule most negatively or positively affects the student's overall score. A rule to drop the lowest score will remove the assignment score(s) from a student's group percentage calculation that will result in the best possible score for that group. A rule to drop the highest score will remove the assignment score(s) from a student's group percentage calculation that will result in the lowest possible score for that group. Dropping both the lowest and the highest score(s) removes any outlying scores and calculates a student’s grade based upon the remaining middle scores.
Dropping scores is based on the impact to the total points for that assignment group. In some cases, the point value may be considered more important than percentage score when determining which assignment to drop. For example, if a student earns 100% on a 50-point assignment, 65% on a 100-point assignment, and 50% on a 24-point assignment, the student’s total score is 127 out of 174 points, or 73% for the assignment group. If an instructor sets a rule to drop the assignment with the lowest score in the assignment group, Canvas will drop the score that gives the student a better total score for the group. Even though the 50% score is the lowest percentage, the assignment with the 65% score will be dropped, giving the student a score of 62 out of 74 points, or an 84%, for the assignment group.

Overall, Canvas is very obviously built around the classroom, academic year-bound use-case, and their tools reflect that - grading periods aren’t the most useful outside of that use-case as they would not be particularly useful outside of a full-time, multi-month course. I’m not certain why you would ever drop highest grades, but at least it’s there as functionality. Being able to set certain assignments to never be dropped is a huge advantage over similar systems in Open edX and Moodle, as I don’t believe I’ve seen any such functionality so far in those systems, just the ability to drop lowest.

Links:

Open edX Product Management

Canvas - Course-Level Assessment Configuration

Analytics

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