CANVAS is giving 100% credit for all assignments when they have not been attempted. How do I fix it

Question

Currently, I have CANVAS set up to give an automatic 0 for assignments not completed by the due date.  Previously, assignments that had not been attempted showed up with a ' - ' mark in Grades. Now, students get a false impression of their grades, as it appears they have 100% for all assignments. How do I get CANVAS to go back to a '-' instead of full credit and better represent the student's scores?

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @AmandaAtkinson,

It sounds to me like you may have two different things going on here, but I'd like to confirm...

For the missing assignments, you have your course missing policy set to give a 0, correct?  If your assignments are Canvas online submissions, this should work great, and a lot of faculty set Canvas up like this at my institution.  If your assignments are on paper of through an external tool (like a publisher's website), the missing policy may not automatically apply though.\

So, with that being said about the missing policy in general, setting that up should not cause students to receive an automatic grade of 100% on anything, which is why I think something else is at play here.  Can you tell us what kind of assignments the ones where students received 10% are?  Are they Canvas online assignments (like a file upload), quizzes, 3rd party assessmentc, etc?  There is an option to set a default grade for an assignment, but you or another teacher in the course would have to deliberately do that, so I don't think that happened here.  I'm wondering if these are 3rd party assignments and the 3rd party system is sending grades back to Canvas, as that seems like the most logical thing in my head right now.

Please do let us know more info when you are able, and someone will try to help you figure out what may be going on.

-Chris

James · Accepted Answer

@AmandaAtkinson

I want to expand on what @chriscas wrote about the missing grades policy.

The gradebook late and missing settings can easily be misunderstood and when they first came out, a lot of people got things backwards.

* The grade for missing submissions is what grade they should receive, not the deduction. A 0 means they get 0% of the point value. 100% means they get all of the points.
* The late submission deduction is a deduction, not the grade they should receive. A 0 means there is no penalty for late work. A 100% means they lose all of the point values if late.

To get Canvas to go back, you would need to go to the Gradebook and check settings. You can check your settings on the late policies tab and adjust as necessary. There is a warning that changing the late policy will affect previously graded submissions. That warning does not appear with the missing submissions assignment. However, if you look at the notes at the top of the How do I apply a Missing Submission policy in the Gradebook? lesson in the Instructors Guide, it explicitly says that setting a missing submission policy affects all assignments in a course, including assignments with due dates in the past.

That behavior is consistent with putting 100 for the missing policy rather than a 0. If that is the case, then one would think that setting it to 0 should fix the issue. But if you keep reading in the notes, it says that disabling a course missing submission policy does not revert the grades that were submitted when the policy was in effect.

I would straighten out the policy first. Make sure the grade for missing submissions is at 0% and then apply the settings. Then, if you don't want to use the policy at all, uncheck the box and hit apply settings.

If things don't revert, you will need to go into the gradebook and manually fix the grades. You can use the gradebook history page to see what grades were changed if you're not sure which 100% scores were legitimate.