[ARCHIVED] How do I correctly reflect grades without it showing a student is missing other assignments?

[athrower]

I have journal entries each lesson week. My students only have to submit 4 journal entries for the entire semester valued at 5 points each, for a total of 20 points in the semester (20% of their overall grade). I have made the journal entries for each week an "assignment" but how can I ensure that Canvas won't dock student's points for not turning in all of the journal entries for each week, when they are only required to submit 4?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello  @athrower  Welcome to the Canvas Community...thanks for posting your question.  Full disclosure, I do not teach courses in Canvas...as I am an administrator for our school's Canvas environment.  So, I'm not sure if this will be a good solution for you or not, but have you considered using the "EX" label to excuse assignments in your Gradebook?  More info here: How do I excuse an assignment for a student in the Gradebook?  Do you think this might work for your needs?

[Shar · Accepted solution]

Hi Alexis Thrower and Welcome indeed!

In general, if there is no score for an assignment in the gradebook, Canvas ignores the assignment. There has to be a 0 in the score for Canvas to count the assignment toward the total. (Unless you tell Canvas not to count the assignment, but that's a different feature/story.)

You didn't mention if you are using old gradebook or new, but from the way you phrased your question with the "missing" label leads me to believe you're using the New Gradebook, with a missing submission policy in place. How do I apply a Missing Submission policy in the New Gradebook?

So, yes you can mark the assignments as excused as Chris suggested, but here are a couple more alternatives:

Alter the Due Dates

The easiest way not to have the assignment counted as missing then is to not have a due date. If you are flexible with when the journal entries are turned in, you can set them all to have a due date for the (near) end of the semester and then nothing will get marked as missing or late until the end of the term. Which also means that the missing policy will also not kick in, so no missing label and also no automatic 0 if you have that set as your policy. 

If you must have due (and close) dates though, you will get missing labels on assignments. The skipped journal entries are still missing and students will probably see the missing label on the ones they do not do, but maybe you want them to know the assignment was not turned in? If you want to remove the Missing labels, you can do it manually one-at-a-time How do I change the status of a submission in the New Gradebook?  or you can do it for multiples using a browser code script Removing Missing and Late Labels 

Another alternative - Ignore scores

Since you mention that the journal entries are worth 20% of the grade, I trust that means you're also using assignment groups. If you are using assignment groups, you can set it to ignore the lowest 12 scores (if there are 16 total)-- which would presumably be the assignments with 0 in them if the missing policy is in place. How do I create rules for an assignment group?  

I think the ignore feature works best at the end of the term, so you may wish to wait until the end to put it in place otherwise it will give a false grade to the student by dropping scores that should actually be kept.

In your situation, I would probably do a combination of altering the due dates and ignoring the lowest scores that way the students who do extra journal entries will have their top entries count. But given 4 journals are required, really I would only have 4 journal entry assignment spots for students to turn in and give them reminders in each week/module of what the topic is they can write about on a Journal Assignment Page with links to the 4 Assignment spots.

Hope these alternatives are helpful,
Cheers - Shar