New Powerschool Grade Passback

[bbennett2]

We migrated to the OneRoster tool for enrollments and grade pass back but have run into an issue where we can't link up our Powerschool grade categories with Canvas. In a Canvas course, I've created categories to sync. According to the documentation, I should be able to pull over my Powerschool grading categories have choose from the list which ones I'd like assignments to sync between.

What we're finding is that grade categories aren't showing from Powerschool - not even the district default categories. Has anyone been able to get the new passback flow working? 

[abennett11 · Accepted solution]

Ours seems to be working correctly now.  As far as I can tell, we had three separate issues that affected different courses:

1. Canvas pulled data through the old SIF connection after we rolled over the school year, but before they had finalized the OneRoster plugin.  When they started pulling data through OneRoster, the sections and enrollments created via the old SIF connection were still there, meaning we had duplicate sections and some outdated enrollment data for kids whose schedules changed after they switched to OneRoster.  I solved this by running a sections export, filtering to only SIF-created sections for this year (they had a much shorter section_id than the OneRoster-created sections), changing their status from "active" to "deleted", then importing to delete those sections.  Canvas Support approved this solution after initially suggesting something that would have cleared out all of our manually-created classes.
2. Presumably trying to fix the broken grade passback, we had some teachers turn off the "automatically sync grades" option, so even after fixing #1, their courses weren't syncing grades.  Turning that back on and manually syncing existing grades did the trick.
3. Some teachers were initially able to sync assignment names, but not grades, then (seeing that grades weren't syncing), deleted the assignment in PowerSchool. This caused an error when that assignment tried to sync over.  This was fixed by resetting integration data for that course, clearing out assignments in PowerSchool that were also in Canvas, then syncing grades.

[mswope · Accepted solution]

We are brand new to PowerSchool passback this year also and had the same exact problem. Ultimately, we reported it to Support AND to our Priority Services team. It got escalated to the Canvas SIS team and, after a week or so, was resolved.  I would love to tell you exactly WHAT they did on the back end to fix it, but they did not share that with us.

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[kendra_murphy1]

We're having some issues as well.

[abennett11]

We are seeing the same issue - there are no options to select from when we try to sync SIS categories.  This feature was working perfectly last year, prior to the switch to OneRoster.

[akime]

We were able to sync SIS categories for our yearlong classes without an issue. Our courses that are S1 only are not able to sync categories. 

[bbennett2]

Update: Our course categories were made available when our Powerschool term started on the first day of school. Since then, we're able to set up the gradebook, but we are still having issues with actually syncing grades. We have a ticket open with Instructure and Powerschool.

[tankovpa]

We observed the same behavior in our instance. The categories to map to did not populate until after the school year defined by PowerSchool started.

A few observations:

In at least one case the grades did not flow because the Canvas Gradebook option to Manually Post Grades (as opposed to Automatically Post) was selected. After changing that setting and posting the grades then the next sync resulted in the 'assignment' and scores appearing in PowerSchool.

Another situation is a change in behavior from the past. Future assignments do not appear/are not created in PowerSchool until there is at least one score in the Canvas Gradebook.

In both of the situations, I noticed that no scores or assignments were synced when looking at the Grade Sync report. On a sync when something is created in PowerSchool the field will have value in the report.

Hopefully, someone finds this helpful. It was causing me some headaches as I was trying to figure out how to get PowerSchool and Canvas to play nice and do what we expected.

[cbradley]

Did you, by chance, notice that the grades that WERE passed back correctly were flagged as "collected" in PowerSchool? All of our passed back grades have the same flag -- even the zeros...

[bbennett2]

Did you ever get documents or written information from Instructure on the future-dated assignments not posting until there's a score? I can't find that documented anywhere.

Also, have you seen issues with posting assignments set to 0 points to Powerschool? 

[tankovpa]

I have not seen it documented or even know if they recognize the issue. It may be known and not viewed as a issue, it is possible that this is the expected behavior by the designers. Either way it would be nice to know. That way we can pursue/follow progress towards either a bug fix or feature request.

[rennickteach]

We have issues with grades passing back as zeroes. Here are a few things we have discovered.

If the due date passes and the teacher still has a - (dash) in it meaning they haven't graded the assignment yet, it passes back as a "hard" zero, displayed as a black number, and impacting the grade in PS, but not in Canvas. We have also found that an Excused assignment in Canvas passes back to PowerSchool as a "soft" zero, displayed as an italicized, purple 0 in PS, but it doesn't impact the grade in either platform. 

Has anyone found issues with a change in teacher not coming over to Canvas, and therefore a few things happen. The original course is now lost completely, so unless we know ahead of time to pull the data, we cannot find it. Secondly, the subsequent teachers never have their course created and we can't find the orphaned course to even crosslist the information.

Has anyone found a work around that still allows for clean GPB?

[abennett11 · Accepted solution]

Ours seems to be working correctly now.  As far as I can tell, we had three separate issues that affected different courses:

1. Canvas pulled data through the old SIF connection after we rolled over the school year, but before they had finalized the OneRoster plugin.  When they started pulling data through OneRoster, the sections and enrollments created via the old SIF connection were still there, meaning we had duplicate sections and some outdated enrollment data for kids whose schedules changed after they switched to OneRoster.  I solved this by running a sections export, filtering to only SIF-created sections for this year (they had a much shorter section_id than the OneRoster-created sections), changing their status from "active" to "deleted", then importing to delete those sections.  Canvas Support approved this solution after initially suggesting something that would have cleared out all of our manually-created classes.
2. Presumably trying to fix the broken grade passback, we had some teachers turn off the "automatically sync grades" option, so even after fixing #1, their courses weren't syncing grades.  Turning that back on and manually syncing existing grades did the trick.
3. Some teachers were initially able to sync assignment names, but not grades, then (seeing that grades weren't syncing), deleted the assignment in PowerSchool. This caused an error when that assignment tried to sync over.  This was fixed by resetting integration data for that course, clearing out assignments in PowerSchool that were also in Canvas, then syncing grades.

[michael_william]

For step 3, did you have the teacher delete each assignment in PowerTeacher Pro one by one, or was there a way for the teacher or admin to delete all assignments in the PowerTeacher Pro gradebook?

[mswope · Accepted solution]

We are brand new to PowerSchool passback this year also and had the same exact problem. Ultimately, we reported it to Support AND to our Priority Services team. It got escalated to the Canvas SIS team and, after a week or so, was resolved.  I would love to tell you exactly WHAT they did on the back end to fix it, but they did not share that with us.

This response was created by one of Instructure’s PandaPros. All Canvas and Mastery Connect users are encouraged to schedule a free 1:1 coaching session between July 18 and September 18, 2022. Learn more by reading our blog!

[lsikora38]

I have reached out to support numerous times and no one ever gets back to me about this issue. It is so frustrating.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @bbennett2 

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