[Permissions] Protect student assignment submissions from being deleted by Teacher
I just discovered today that a Teacher can remove an assignment and all the students' submissions to that assignment, and grades for those submissions from their Canvas course. They can do this from the three little dots on the Assignment page. There isn't even a warning that there have been student submissions to the Assignment, in case the professor deleted the wrong assignment in error. These student submissions and grades may or may not be able to be recovered via /undelete. (In my testing today, a deleted assignment with student submissions was not recoverable via /undelete, and the only way Canvas Support could find the assignment submissions and grades I deleted with my instructor persona (not my admin powers) and restore them was by paging through my page views to find the assignment ID) My understanding is the logic behind not allowing a faculty member to 'unpublish' an assignment or 'remove a single student submission from an assignment' is to keep the student submission data secure. However, and bear with me, allowing a faculty member to go through their course and remove all assignments and all student submissions and grades is somehow in line with securing student data? What if a faculty member is angry about their contract not being removed, and wants to delete all their 'intellectual property' on their way out the door? We would be really up a creek if we allow them to do this and then don't know that they HAVE done this until it is too late. This seems very serious to me, but Canvas Support just says it's not a bug.
If there are some institutions that for some reason allow or need this current ability of a Teacher to do wholesale deletion of student submissions, Please make it a permission you can turn on and off for the Teacher role? Allow or Don't Allow "Delete Assignments that have Student Submissions" Please note that this is not the same as allowing Teachers to delete Assignments, which they need to be able to do. This new permission would be specific to assignments to which students have already submitted work.
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