Need a work-around to report grades. Please help!

[corderg]

Hello. If you are using the Multiple Grading Periods feature, have you found a way to accurately report grades after the first grading period? If so, please tell others how you did it.

It appears that Canvas came up with the feature all of K-12 schools have clamored for - multiple grading periods - but did not come up with a way to report those grades or export them to a report card or other grade reporting software. The grade exports are all done ONLY by term. So if you have a full-year course with 4 quarters, the grade export will only be accurate for the first quarter. After that, it will be a combined average of the first two quarters, then the first three, etc.

I have not come up with a workaround other than to create 4 separate courses for each course. I have called Tech Support and they had no fix. Neither did my CSM. I am trying not to be negative, although it's EXTREMELY frustrating.

If you are also in this boat, we need to put our heads together and come up with a work-around until this flaw is corrected. Also, please vote starting October 7 for this feature -

[kona]

Unfortunately I don't have a work around for this, but I'm going to share it with the K-12​ group in the Community in the hopes that someone there might have a work around.

[corderg]

Thank you.

[joseph_allen]

I have the exact same problem.  Our CSM gave us the usual nonsense of 'vote it up', but I said, if they build your car without brakes, you are not going to 'vote' on whether it should have brakes, you fix the problem.

This is a fundamental flaw in Canvas.  We can't figure out any way to get quarter grades out of the system.  For Q1 we will be fine, but we need a report that has date filters, or grading period filter for Q2,3 and 4.

Canvas has told us to use 'terms', but that doesn't work for a year long 5th grade math class.  You aren't going to have a term for each quarter. If you did, then you'd have to re-enroll everyone, there would be no continuity to the Canvas course site. At the high school level terms wouldn't allow you to calculate grades correctly.

Please contact me if you want to talk about solutions, but I believe Canvas has to step up, and quickly, to help us with this one.  I don't think there is a work around.

Joe Allen

Howard County Public School System

joseph_allen@hcpss.org

410-313-6832

[corderg]

Thank you, Joe. I am 100% in agreement with you. Waiting and voting on a serious flaw is ludicrous. I submitted a ticket saying exactly the same thing.

Canvas, you have to fix this!!!

Gail Corder

Trinity Valley School

[clong]

Our workaround is to not use Multiple grading periods, but we don't typically make a new course for each quarter. For us quarter grades are sent out, but it is really the semester grades that are the ones that matter and go on a student's transcript.

When it is time to report the quarter grades we suggest that our teachers export their gradebook and then we have developed a web page where they  will see all their current grades fin Canvas have the opportunity to change them, then hit a submit button and they are moved into our SIS (Aeries) which then sends out the report cards and stores the info.

At this point I don't think that having a year long class in Canvas is a good idea. Even with the multiple grading periods on you and your poor students would still have tons of assignments to wade through and things start to sloooow down on you.

I do agree that Canvas should provide 'the brakes' my advice is don't drive a car without the breaks and in the meantime get into the - Grades Export w/ Multiple Grading Periods idea and vote.

I'm going to flag this as answered because that is as much as the user community can do here, feel free to continue the convo here and in the feature idea board.

[scottdennis · Accepted solution]

Hi All,

Only being able to generate a report that shows an average across multiple periods is not intended functionality with multiple grading periods.  We are working on option that will let you export grade information that with discrete totals per period rather than a running average of all periods.  In the mean time you can filter to a specific period in the gradebook to view totals.  We are also working on letting you export only grades for what you have filtered to (ie; only grades for period two).  I do not have a timeline to share but we are actively working to address these issues.

Thank you,

Scott Dennis

[kmeeusen]

I don't work in a K12 environment, so am probably way off mark here, but has anyone considered using an assignment group for each grading period? That would give you a total for the grading period, and at the end of the term it would show the cumulative grade for the year. Just a thought, but please let me know if I am way off-base here.

[corderg]

I can only speak for my school, but no, it won't work for us. Our teachers use the Assignment groups to create categories for grades and to weigh them (e.g. Quizzes count 25%, Daily Work counts 25%, etc.)

[kmeeusen]

Thanks for the explanation, and I am sorry that tip didn't help.

Back to the drawing board!

[corderg]

I appreciate it though!!  

[joseph_allen]

Scott,

Thanks for the comment.  I think most K12's using grading periods need this functionality asap as we are approaching Q2 and interims for the traditional school year.  Teachers are not happy when you tell them they have to split screen to see quarter grades in Canvas and enter them into another SIS.

There are two other related issue that need to be considered:

The grades that appears in the mobile app is an aggregate grade.  We need a grading period filter there.  Otherwise you have to continually remind students and parents that the grade is inaccurate, its a year long average and they bark back at us that it is a flawed product.

The second issue is when a student clicks the grade button in the browser version of Canvas, same thing - its a year long average and it really needs to be the most recent quarter or have a drop down.  The year long average means nothing in a K12, they need to see grades by grading period.  Our work around to solve this is to hide the grades and force students to click on each course.  But parents and students are then clamoring for an overall view of grades which we can't provide.

Please help.

[clong]

Have you considered making new classes for the courses that you need separate grading periods for? We have been doing this for a couple years now and it works great. Most of our courses are split at the 18 week semester so we have Algebra 1a and Algebra 1b but we also have some courses that issue quarterly credits to the transcripts so those are split into 4 (9 week quarters).

Being that there is no guaranteed time for Canvas to develop and deploy the new features that would help make the Multiple Grading Periods more useful, I think you could implement this approach and save some frustration. It also helps improve the speed of the course gradebooks, syllabus page views and overall course management.

Just some food for thought

[corderg]

Thank you for that suggestion, Chris. We did that last year, when there were no multiple grading periods. But this year, when they promised multiple grading periods, we were hoping not to. Especially now, because our 5th and 6th grades are on Quarters, not semesters. We made that decision partly because Canvas promised to support it.

So here we are...

[DonnaMuller]

Has there been anymore done in this area?  I would  love to see the ability to select a date range and only export or average grades for those dates.