Different assignment weights for different student groups

User86743630

Hello,

I am setting up a course in Canvas with various different assignment groups that are weighted by different percentages in the "Assignments" tab.

I have also split the class into two STUDENT groups, let's call them Group A and Group B.

Question: Is there a way to weight the assignments differently for these two student groups?

For instance, Group A student grades are weighted as 40% HW and 60% Exams, while Group B student grades are weighted as 50% HW and 50% Exams.

James

It's been a while since I've seen someone ask this question, but it used to be one that would pop up every now and then. A situation might arise where group A were undergraduates taking a course and group B were graduate students.

The answer from years ago is still the same today. From Canvas' perspective, the simplest way is to have them as separate Canvas courses. There is no built-in, easy way to accomplish this.

The ability to split them would be something that would have to be decided by your institution and it may not be a possibility, so I'll talk about other ways to accomplish this.

A very complex way would be to duplicate each assignment and create separate assignment groups for each student group. Let's call the assignment groups 40% HW A, 60% Exams A, 50% HW B, and 50% Exams B. Then you would assign only students in group A to the first set of assignment groups. You would assign only students in group B to the second assignment groups. Since students in group A are not assigned anything in the B's assignment groups, they would never see the B-group assignments and their point totals would add up to be 100%. A similar situation arises for group B not seeing group A's assignments.

You can use differentiated assignments to do this, but it would involve going through ahead of time and adding each group to the appropriate assignments. It used to be that having the students in different sections was the easiest way, but many institutions control those through Student Information System imports and don't allow faculty to creat their own sections (we're one of those institutions). Canvas has now developed differentiated tags that instructors can create and so I would look into that.

If you have a large class, this might be the approach you want since you don't have to do anything once it's set up.

A second approach is for you to manually adjust grades by creating separate assignments that hold the actual grade. Make these "no submission" and worth 100 points each.

Make each existing assignment not count towards the final grade. I would recommend doing this by making the assignment groups be worth 0% of the grade rather than checking the box for each assignment. You still have HW and Exams as assignment groups, but they are worth 0% of the grade. This allows them to see what their scores are in each assignment group and then you teach them how to calculate what their final grade will be.

Eventually, there should be an assignment that contains their actual grade. Depending on the class, this could be updated after major assignments, daily, weekly, monthly, or at midterm and the end of the course. It's extra work for you to update it, so you have to weigh the benefit to the student vs the cost.

• Create an assignment group worth 100% of the grade that contains an assignment called "Class Grade" or something like that. This has no submission and is worth 100 points. In that assignment, you manually calculate their grade according to whichever scheme they are using. You will need to track the students and manually compute the grades, although you could export the gradebook, have Excel calculate the scores, and then reimport it.
• Create four assignment groups as explained in the first method: 40% HW A, 60% Exams A, 50% HW B, and 50% Exams B. I would place these at the bottom of the assignments page so that the can easily be seen from the gradebook with less scrolling (gradebook filters have reduced this requirement somewhat). Place one assignment in each of these that has no submission and is worth 100 points. Then look at your gradebook where it gives the totals for the HW and Exam assignment groups and transfer those totals over to the assignments in the new groups. Each student would get grades transferred to either the A or B groups but not both. You would need to pay attention to which group the students were in the first time you do this, but subsequent updates would allow you to just look at where the grades were already entered. The benefit of this approach is that Canvas will do the calculations for you and that students can see when there is a disagreement between their actual score and what you have entered so that they can do the math themselves if you're not updating frequently enough. The downside is that you're duplicating a lot of scores.

Canvas is going to show more than 100% as your total, but that is okay because students will never have grades in assignment groups totaling more than 100%.

Here is what the assignments page may look like (HW got cut off due to space restrictions).

I would probably use a different name for each group instead of "HW Grade" for both. You could use "HW A Grade" or "HW 40% Grade" or even just "HW 40%". The different names is for you to be able to tell where to put the scores and using HW 40% for both an assignment name and an assignment category name may be confusing.

There may be other approaches, but hopefully this will give you an idea of what can be done.

In summary, the first approach requires the most work upfront but the least on-going maintenance. It's now a lot easier since differentiated tags are available. The second approach is easier to set up but requires more on-going work. The simplest approach from a Canvas perspective is to have the students in different Canvas courses.