Issue when giving overall extra credit with weighted assignment groups

[MGh9]

(I am new to Canvas, so perhaps I am missing something obvious.)

Issue #1: I want to create a separate assignment group for Extra Credit which can boost students' overall percentage grade by up to 1%. My other assignment groups add up to 100%, and every assignment is in points, not %. In my Extra Credit assignment group, I have one grade worth 3 points.

Suppose a student has a 60% average and has not earned any extra credit. When I have the Extra Credit category counting as 0%, I see their average (correctly) as 60%. However, when I increase the Extra Credit weighting to 1% (so my assignment weightings now total 101%), that student's average drops to 59.4%, so it's like Canvas is normalizing my desired 101% possible back to 100% and that student is penalized for not having any extra credit.

That seems to contradict the "Create Extra Credit using Weighted Assignment Groups" section of https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-give-extra-credit-in-a-course/ta-p/1253 which shows 110% total (but I can't see what the "2 rules" are there.)

Issue #2: Even though I have set the options for that one 3-point assignment to appear in points rather than %, Canvas keeps showing it as % on the Grades page.

What am I missing?

[Jeff_F]

Hell @MGh9 - ahead of testing a solution for this question I read this guide: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-give-extra-credit-in-a-course/ta-p/1253

I then went to my test course where I have two assignment groups each worth 50% of the grade weighting: in-class activities and homework. As the guide directs, I created a new zero point non submission 'Extra Credit' assignment within the in-class activity assignment group. I imagine this could be used to reward attendance, participation, etc.

I then went to Grades where I experimented by entering different values into the Extra Credit column for the test student. The goal was to determine what number I needed to enter in order to force a single point increase to the overall course grade. For this test course with relatively few assignments it was an even 4. For a course with more assignments it will be a higher number. 

I might suggest adding the Extra Credit assignment to an assignment group that has a higher weighting. 

Example

[MGh9]

Thank you, Jeff.

I was trying to avoid a solution like this because I want to be able to update the extra credit category as students earn it so that they know exactly where they stand. I also don't want to have to be fiddling with how many points I need to add to make the extra credit work out correctly and have that # not make sense to students (lack of transparency); having it as part of a category and having to update it as I add more assignments to that category seems like a lot of work.

My university Canvas contact had told me to try the 101% total solution, that she thought that would accomplish what I was trying to do. That would work great if there were a way to tell the system to use 100% (normal) as a baseline - perhaps an option, a checkbox, but I'm not familiar enough to even know if that exists. The article that I referenced seemed to imply that this was what should happen with their solution, but it doesn't seem to actually work that way in practice, unless I am missing something.

[MGh9 · Accepted solution]

This post explains my issue and gives a great solution:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Higher-Ed-Users/Extra-credit-using-weighted-assignment-groups/ba-...