[ARCHIVED] How to give every student the same grade for an "essay" question

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fparsch
Community Novice
‎01-26-2020 05:39 PM

I have an orientation quiz with:

  • four multiple choice questions, 1 point each
  • four essay questions, 0 points each. Those were just feedback opportunities that can't be right or wrong, which is why I assigned 0 points to each.

I would like to post the grades, but it seems that Canvas requires me to manually go into every single students four essay submissions and type a zero into the "--/0" box. Otherwise canvas treats the quiz as ungraded and I can't post the grades.

The problem is that my course has 800 students. So Now I would have to go to 3200 boxes in speed grader to assign 0/0 to each essay question before I can send students their grades.

Am I missing an option/setting here? I really just want every student to get 0/0 for those essay questions and post the grades. But I couldn't find an option to just give every student the same points for a question.

Besides that, shouldn't a question that is worth 0 points be autograded as 0 by Canvas anyways?

Thanks for your help!

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James
Community Champion
‎01-26-2020 07:54 PM

 @fparsch  

There are several approaches that come to mind, but it depends on what you do in this course after they take this quiz.

If it is a capstone quiz for exiting the orientation (and you remove them), then you may be able to determine that they've completed it satisfactorily without actually posting the grade.

If this is a quiz early on and they continue, then what I would do is separate the assignment into two parts. Make one a graded quiz with the 4 multiple choice questions and make the other part a graded survey for the essay questions. I say graded because they won't complete it if it's not graded and not a prerequisite for moving on, but you might be able to do an ungraded survey as well. The multiple choice quiz will be autograded and the graded survey gets points for completing it, not for what you write.

Another possibility, is to manipulate the quizzes using the API. This is an advanced technique that I won't go into here as the other ways are easier.

There's also a script I wrote for SpeedGrader that will automatically assign full points for an essay question and it has an update and advanced to next user button. You would still have to click the update and advance button 800 times, but you wouldn't need to go through and assign 0 points to all of the essay questions.

I would lean heavily towards the splitting it up option as it's automatically handled by Canvas and doesn't require any programming on your part. You could excuse the quiz for the student who have already completed the quiz.

If a lot of students have already completed the quiz and you need to set a score, then it's going to be time consuming (clicking or writing a program) until you can get it split.

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