Quiz has fictitious, fractional scores

My midterm quizzes have fractional scores even though that is impossible. My quiz has 31 possible points, and there is no way for a student to get a fraction of a point. Despite this, all the grades have decimals to the hundredths, and they do not correspond to the actual grade.

For example, a student who got 28 points on the quiz has a recorded gradebook score of 26.19. Huh?

I never curved the grades using the option in the dropdown in the gradebook. I am unaware of choosing an option that permits some score other than the actual score to appear in the gradebook.

What is the best way to fix this, and how do I prevent Canvas from messing up grades in the future?

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SusanNiemeyer

Can you post a screenshot of how you set up your quiz?

Ron_Bowman

@arencambre I agree with @SusanNiemeyer . Can you provide more information about the quiz - the assignment group(possibly) and 2 or 3 of the actual results that you are seeing. My first thought was that the autograde on the quiz was giving you the fractional points. from your post it sounds like a student has a 28/31 and therefore you would expect to see 28. Or, did you make the quiz worth more points (or less I guess) than the actual questions will provide - if you are using New quizzes. Which reminded me which version of Quizzes are you using? New Quiz or Classic Quiz?

nwilson7

@arencambre While you setup the quiz to be worth 31 points, when you created the questions, do those points also add up to 31? With new quizzes, these two can differ (meaning I could set a quiz to be worth 31 points but then the questions only add up to 28) and Canvas will do the math behind the scenes to give proportional points, which many times will work out to decimals. Also, did you do any questions with multiple answers? This question type will award fractions of points for correct answers and removes fractions of points for incorrect, which will many times result in decimals as well.

Just a few thoughts!

-Nick

jc71

I ended up with the same things, but it was from a different cause. I created a new quiz (import a .qti file) that had 34 questions, each worth 1 point. Students took it, and then, through the regrading process, I changed the point value of 2 of the questions to be worth only 0.5 points each, so the total test grade should have been worth. I now understand that the decimal grades (e.g., 25.76) that got reported were scaling the score out of 33 to be out of the original 34 points since the point values don't automatically update for the whole test when you change questions (a warning would have been really nice here!).

However, having figured that out, I then changed the point value for the entire quiz back to 33. As shown below, speedgrader (and the exported data file) correctly recognize that the points earned was 25 out of 33 points. The grade box now recognizes that the grade is out of 33 points. However, it still has the decimal grade (25.76 = 25/33 scaled to be out of 34). Canvas didn't scale it back down after I fixed the total number of points on the quiz.

I tried regrading another question, without actually changing anything, but that did not change the decimal. I tried adding 0.0 as fudge points, but that didn't do anything. What worked was to add 0.0001 as fudge points to every student's grade.

It seems like Canvas should have gone from a test originally worth 34 points, to the changed point values for 2 questions and thus the 25/33 on the quiz (which was still 25.76/34 in the gradebook), and then, when the total points on the test went back to 33, to scale the test score back to being out of 33. This seems especially true because it recognizes (as seen in the screenshot), the points earned and points possible. It even has that as the final score at the bottom of the page.

EDIT: It turns out that it fixed it eventually! While I had given it 10-15 minutes and re-loading to update, it turns out it just needed much longer. By the time I'd finished searching for help and typing this, it re-scored them. I'm leaving the comment here for other folks to see this and know that it is fixable without going through tests one-by-one.

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