Resetting a Single Student in a Manually Created Course

[LeshundraYoung]

I teach an AP Class with a manually created summer assignment. I had a student who initially enrolled in the course for last school term who only partially completed the summer assignment activities because they found out the class time wouldn't work with their schedule. The student was removed from the course last year but is now on the roster to take the course this upcoming term.

Instead of recreating a different course I change the year and dates and remove old students before adding in the new ones. When the student was added back to the summer assignment for this term, all of the grades from the previous year repopulated. 

Is there a way to reset only this student's scores? 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @LeshundraYoung,

I don't think there's going to quite be an "easy button" solution for this unfortunately.  If you just wish to remove scores from the gradebook, you could do that by going to the grades area, going to the first assignment cell for the student, hitting the delete key on your keyboard, then the right arrow to the next one, delete again, right arrow again, and so on...  That would get the grade info removed, but the student's submissions would still be in speedgrader, discussion content may still be around, and any attempt-limited assignments/quizzes could be a big problem, as the student's previous attempts would still be there.  I don't believe it's possible to clear all of that stuff in Canvas.

Going forward, I'd suggest creating a new course shell every time the course is taught.  That way you won't run in to any issues like this in the future, and you could even let previous students access their old courses in a read-only mode if you wanted to.  It's fairly easy to import course content from one course to another, so it shouldn't be much more work for anyone to do this, and will probably prevent more unforeseen issues from occurring.

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[LeshundraYoung]

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your response. Since it's an AP Course, most students don't end up in it twice. It's easier to just change the dates. I've used the same course for the last 4 years since it's just a review of Biology 1 content. My district doesn't allow us access to delete any courses once created, even the ones done manually. So, I'd rather reuse a course than keep creating and adding to the list of courses. 

This was just a unique situation. I was just checking to see if the student could be reset before adding an additional attempt to all of her assignments she didn't complete.  I noticed that in student view the Test Student could be reset so I was wondering if the same was true for actual students. If not, it's no biggie. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel if i didn't have to. 

[chriscas]

Thanks for the additional info @LeshundraYoung .  The reset option for student view/test student is somewhat unique because of the nature of that particular account being used by an instructor to get a preview of the course as a student.  With real user accounts, Canvas generally makes it almost impossible to remove a lot of student-related data.  Admins can sometimes delete a submitted file, and some users can moderate discussion content, but that's really about it (aide from resetting the entire course, which wipes out ass assignments and everything).  It seems like your plan to add additional attempts and wipe out grades  is probably the best way to handle your situation, unless anyone else comes along and knows of some super secret trick and can share it.

-Chris