[ARCHIVED] Could Assignment Groups be nested within other Assignment Groups?

[cwalker]

I'm sure there are many examples of how this could be useful--here is one example:

A course's grades are divided into two main groups with associated weighting: Theory (60%) and Practice (40%).

Theory is divided into subgroups: Assignments (40%), Discussions (30%), and Quizzes (30%).

Practice is divided into subgroups: Research (50%) and Presentations (50%).

This is currently only possible by ensuring that your points for all assignments in a subgroup are properly "weighted", but that only works if course assignments are fixed, which means the teacher has no option of giving a pop-quiz or other flex assignment during the semester....at least not for points without lowering another assignment's points.

This would go a long way in improving Canvas Gradebook flexibility.

[ericwerth]

Hi  @cwalker .  This is a good idea, and similar to the idea posted here, https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/7130-assignment-weighting-in-assignment-groups" modifiedtitle=....  You might consider posting your thoughts to this thread as another caveat to the ability to better control what impacts the weighting of each group.  However, there are way to avoid having to make what would be subgroups work only via their point value.  When we have faculty who have a class that is both lecture and lab for example, and if lecture is broken up into multiple components, I suggest they make separate assignment groups for each of these.  In your example, there could be "Theory-Assignments" worth 40% of 60% of the final grade, "Theory-Discussions" worth 30% of 60% of the final grade, etc.  This at least provides some flexibility if an instructor is not sure how many discussions there will be, but does know that regardless they only want it to be 18% of the final grade of the entire course.

Thanks for posting!

[cwalker · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the feedback and I did go ahead and post this in the other thread. Organizationally and for simplicity, I like nesting the AG's, but this certainly is a workable solution to avoid "point weighting" until there is, hopefully, a better solution--thanks!

[ericwerth]

I agree  @cwalker .  I would love to be able to have weighted assignment groups nest even two levels deep.  

All the best!

[juanfie]

I can think of at least one case that cannot be solved using that scheme.  Imagine you have an assignment group for projects.  You want to drop the lowest grade; that was the first motivation to group them.  Additionally, every project has a different maximum number of points assigned to it.  So you need to weigh them inside the group, so you could group within groups and weight each subgroup separately.

I see hierarchical groups as a much-needed feature of Canvas.

Best,

Juan Flores