[New Quizzes] Allow Sensible Handling of Highest Score with Late Submission Penalty with Multiple Attempts

[AlanIsaac]

Problem statement:

Consider a 5 point quiz set to multiple attempts, highest score, and late penalty. Suppose a student takes the quiz on time and earns 4.5/5. The student then uses the quiz a second time for practice after the due data and earns 5/5 but is scored at 2.5 because of a 50% late submission penalty. I expect (and my students expect) that the student's gradebook score will be 4.5, but currently it will be the very surprising 2.5. I have not been able to find anyone who expects the current behavior, so I urge you to classify the current behavior as a UX bug. I see that this unexpected behavior was reported on GitHub in 2018 (here: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/issues/1354) but nobody has been assigned to it.

Proposed solution:

For the purpose of computing a "highest score", use the post-penalty scores not the pre-penalty scores. This is the ordinary meaning of "highest score" and is expected by students and teachers alike.

User role(s):

instructor

[KristinL]

Hi @AlanIsaac -

Thank you for sharing this idea! Are you experiencing this behavior in Classic Quizzes or New Quizzes?

[AlanIsaac]

I use Classic Quizzes because I need to use browser lockdown and question banks.

However, I was told by our campus Canvas support (by someone who used to work for Instructure) that this issue is not rooted in the quiz type but in the interaction of the grading policies in the grade book: the late penalty is applied after the highest score is selected. This becomes a logic error when multiple attempts are allowed and not all attempts are late.