Gradebook - "Statuses"

[DrAJP]

Greetings,

I need a way to edit the text on one of the "Statuses" in the grade book. We can edit the color, but not the text. I need one to say "Extension." Is there a way to do this with external code, or is this something Canvas can enable? Seems like a basic feature that we should be able to edit the specific text, too. 

Thanks,

AJP 

[chriscas]

Hi @DrAJP,

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a way to have custom statuses in the gradebook.  While it's true that the statuses do have a title and color, there is back-end functionality tied in to those statuses.  For example, the Missing and Late statuses control the application or Missing and Late policies.  Excused tells the gradebook to ignore that assignment when calculating a total grade.

Are you trying to have an Extension status to remind yourself or other teachers that the student was granted an extension, or how would you envision this functioning?  I was thinking about suggesting a grading scheme, where you could essentially tie a letter grade (or perhaps a code) to points, but came to the conclusion that it would make things messy for all of your students and not solve the original problem anyways.

Let us know how you'd like to use this functionality and maybe someone will have suggestions I'm not thinking about.  You could also consider submitting this as an idea for the Instructure team to consider adding to Canvas in the future (but it will not happen overnight(.

-Chris

[DrAJP]

Thank you for your reply. 

I do have "Extension" as part of my grading scheme (in BB and in Canvas) and worth 1%. We're switching from Blackboard to Canvas right now. In BB, I can easily set a column (and I do this for all columns) to show a letter grade only. I always hide the running averages. In Canvas--and it's another thing I find very problematic in Canvas--is that there's no way to show students only the letter grade. They see the letter and number grade. Thus, I'm worried that--despite reminders I will give--that students will be alarmed about what it means. 

And yes, it's a reminder for them but especially for me. I teach about 200 university students each term in 6 classes. It's just me, no TAs. Every class has numerous low- or lower-stakes assignments. 

It seems like the ability to customize statuses--among many other things--would just be natural, givens that Canvas would let users customize. And seems like "extension" is one that many instructors would find useful. 

The "suggest an idea link" takes me to a "You do not have sufficient privileges for this resource or its parent to perform this action" error message. But when I was digging around yesterday, I saw that the links to submit ideas were currently closed while Canvas creates a new way to do this. 

AJP