Canvas API Assignments bug

Question

Hi, FYI, I came across the following issue.. Assignments - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation // If this is a group assignment, boolean flag indicating whether or not // students will be graded individually. "grade_group_students_individually": false, This field is always false regardless of whether the Grade as Group is set or not in an Assignment. The only way to reliably tell if it is a Group or Individual assignment is to check if the "group_category_id" is null or has a value. Thanks, Siegfried

James · Accepted Answer

@sniedinger

This is not a bug, it's the way conditional statements work. If the condition (it's a group assignment) isn't true, then it doesn't matter what follows so you shouldn't rely on it.

In other words, Canvas is saying that the grade_group_students_individually flag is only usable when it's a group assignment and should be ignored otherwise. That is the way that it behaves as well. You should only check grade_group_students_individually after checking for a group assignment.

A bug would be if it was it was a group assignment and the checkbox to grade students individually was checked but it was still false.