Dynamic Weight Scoring?

Question

Hello!! I hope you all are doing well! I was hoping to reach out to this community for your expertise on a grading issue I am experiencing for a course that I am helping with. The course is designed to give students autonomy over their learning, with a combination of mandatory and optional assignments that affect the weight of the final exam.

Course Details:

* Mandatory Assignments:

* Lab Assessment #1 (10%)
* Lab Assessment #2 (10%)
* Metacognitive Course Assessment (10%)
* Cumulative Final Exam (15-70%)

* Optional Assignments:

* Engagement in Class (5%)
* Pamphlet (20%)
* Weekly Quizzes (up to 30%, each quiz worth 2%, there is 15 weeks in the course)

The more optional assignments students complete, the less their final exam will be worth. For example, if a student completes all optional assignments, their final exam will be worth 15% of their grade. Conversely, if no optional assignments are completed, the final exam will be worth 70%.

When I entered these assignments into Canvas using weighted assignment groups, the total weight comes to 155%. Last October, I was able to test this setup, and Canvas dynamically adjusted the weights to ensure the final grade totaled 100%. However, this functionality does not seem to be working now. So, I am hoping to connect with you all to see if you have had a similar experience with creating assignment groups that exceed 100% in Canvas and have successfully implemented dynamic scoring/calculating in the gradebook. Any insights, tips, or examples of how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!!

Gabriel33 · Accepted Answer

Are you sure you had weighted assignment groups last year? If you have non-weighted assignment groups, then if you choose the gradebook total grade to be shown as a percentage, it will be out of 100%. But weighted assignment groups can add up to 100%. I've used that for bonus points that are beyond the 100%.

The closest I can think of a semi-automated way for Canvas to calculate the score as you describe is to have 4 copies of the Final Exam assignment, each in a different assignment group:

* First one alone, in a group worth 15%
* Second together with an Engagement in class assignment, worth 5%
* Third together with the Pamphlet, worth 20%
* Fourth one with the weekly quizzes assignment, worth 30% (this one may be trickier, since there are 15 of those - would probably need to have a single assignment grade for all)

Where the second to fourth groups have a policy to drop the lowest grade, and within these 3 groups, the final and the "other" assignment are worth the same number of points.

(the rule in each group is the same, to drop the lowest)

The non-automated part of this is that you'd need to copy the Final Exam grade to all assignments, and perhaps in grouping the Weekly Quizzes to one single assignment.

It may also be slightly different from what you asked for, as if a student submits the Pamphlet, but gets a lower grade on it than the final, the pamphlet grade is going to be dropped.