I'm working in an environment where we use a lot of ungraded surveys and courses are large (200-500 enrollment). We've been transitioning to New Quizzes, and it's been bumpy. I've searched a lot in the community for posts or questions around workarounds to the lack of surveys, including the use of complete/incomplete grading, and surprisingly haven't come up with much, so thought I'd write about our experience in case it helps anyone out there.

Our hope was to make new quizzes worth 0 points and graded complete/incomplete, thinking that any submission would be entered in the gradebook as complete. Nope, in our experience and confirmed by Instructure Support, even if all questions are answered correctly, 0 points = 0% = incomplete (an X) in the gradebook. (Note: according to Support, grades for New Quizzes are calculated as (earned question pts / possible question pts) x quiz pt value)

Then we tried adding some points but keeping the grade type complete/incomplete. Responding with all correct answers did auto-grade as complete (assumes no essay questions which cannot be auto graded). But all incorrect auto-graded as incomplete (an X) in the gradebook. And something in the middle resulted in the submission icon in the gradebook, meaning it logged the quiz as submitted but not graded. (According to Support, processing partial credit for a complete/incomplete assessment is a limitation of LTI tools in Canvas; it's a known issue that they're working on but with no timeline.)

Manually grading these is painful. Though the "set default grade as" feature (How do I set a default grade for an assignment in the Gradebook?) can be of help sometimes, it is tedious and time-consuming to update grades for all students to document who submitted and who didn't.

The best workaround we could figure is to make the quiz worth at least one point, and put that point on (and only on) a question students will, by design, get "correct". If the point is on a multiple choice question, under options, you can check "Vary points by answer" and give all answer options the same maximum points. If the point is on a fill in the blank, you can set the text match to "close enough" and make the placeholder text and the Levenshtein Distance the maximum number of characters you want to allow; be sure to let students know the character limit in the instructions. All other questions should be worth 0 points.

This works out whether you use complete/incomplete or points as display grade.

As with all "surveys", be sure to "restrict student result view" in quiz settings so students don't see correct/incorrect answers or their points earned.

It's still just a workaround. I hope we get smoother, more robust options for surveys and questions without correct answers soon.

If you have other workarounds that don't require manual grading, would love to hear them!