Late Submissions and Automatically Applying Late Deductions

[JordanGarciaNAU]

Hi, I am working with a faculty member who is trying to solve a specific issue for his course. He wants to have the Automatically apply deduction to late submissions option enabled.  He wants to have deadlines for assignments be due at 11:59 PM but still be submittable without penalty until 3 PM the next day. He wants the 11:59 expectation to exists, but not to the detriment of the student if they aren't able to submit it until the morning.

We tested to see if using the following setting would allow for a student to turn in a submission after the due date but not before a full 24 hour timespan elapsed, resulted in no late penalty being applied.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and something even stranger is happening. 

 I submitted a test assignment 12 hours later 11 hours and 43 minutes later so it shows it as being .49 days late and implements a deduction of 90 points. 

First of all, does anyone know if the day interval takes into account a full 24 hours before a grade deduction occurs. And if it does not, why did it give a deduction of the 90 points in the example above?

Your input is greatly appreciated, thank you!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @JordanGarciaNAU,

As you have seen through testing, the late penalty applies basically immediately after the submission deadline passes.  There is no way to add a grace period or anything invisible like that to the late penalty in Canvas right now.

As to your second question, what you have in the late policy setup right now basically says deduct 100% per day late.  Combined with the above statement, this essentially means every submission would be bound to get a 0, unless the student scored more than 100% to begin with.  The late policy won't cause negative scores though thankfully.  So, since you scored the submission as a 90, but it was late, the 100% penalty kicked in and reduced the score down to 0.

I think something more common would be a 10%-20% per day penalty, which would reduce scores but not take them down to 0 for at least a few days.  This really depends on the class and assignment though, but I can certainly say a 100% late penalty is not something you'd want to implement, as it would be better in that case to just not accept late submissions at all (in my opinion).

Hope this info helps!

-Chris

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

You cannot use this approach to create a soft deadline

The specified penalty is applied for each day (if day is set as the interval) or part of a day.

I just tried a 100% penalty per day and submitted an assignment that was due at 3:50pm at 3:51pm

100% of the awarded grade was deducted leaving the sample student with a 0

You could use a smaller penalty and maybe also use the available until field to create an absolute deadline...

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @JordanGarciaNAU,

As you have seen through testing, the late penalty applies basically immediately after the submission deadline passes.  There is no way to add a grace period or anything invisible like that to the late penalty in Canvas right now.

As to your second question, what you have in the late policy setup right now basically says deduct 100% per day late.  Combined with the above statement, this essentially means every submission would be bound to get a 0, unless the student scored more than 100% to begin with.  The late policy won't cause negative scores though thankfully.  So, since you scored the submission as a 90, but it was late, the 100% penalty kicked in and reduced the score down to 0.

I think something more common would be a 10%-20% per day penalty, which would reduce scores but not take them down to 0 for at least a few days.  This really depends on the class and assignment though, but I can certainly say a 100% late penalty is not something you'd want to implement, as it would be better in that case to just not accept late submissions at all (in my opinion).

Hope this info helps!

-Chris

[JordanGarciaNAU · Accepted solution]

Thank you @chriscas . That clarified this issue for me for sure. Appreciate your time and response!

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

You cannot use this approach to create a soft deadline

The specified penalty is applied for each day (if day is set as the interval) or part of a day.

I just tried a 100% penalty per day and submitted an assignment that was due at 3:50pm at 3:51pm

100% of the awarded grade was deducted leaving the sample student with a 0

You could use a smaller penalty and maybe also use the available until field to create an absolute deadline...

[JordanGarciaNAU]

Thanks Brian! Too bad, seems like it could have been a solution for this faculty member. Thank you for this response nonetheless!