How-to
Basic GradeBook Use
Only graded assignments, graded discussions, graded quizzes, and graded surveys that have been published display in the Gradebook. Not Graded assignments are not included. Learn more about the Gradebook here.
Speed Grader
SpeedGrader is the Canvas tool designed to help you evaluate individual student assignments and group assignments quickly. Learn more about SpeedGrader here.
Assignment Categories
Nearly all course activities, including Discussions, Assignments and Quizzes can be managed in the Assignments area of your course site. Here, you can categorize activities and assign a weight to each of those categories.
To build an assignment category:
- Navigate to Assignments
- Click the + Group button
- Give the group a name
- Click the Save button
To assign a weight to each category:
- Click the icon with three dots on the upper right of the screen
- Select Assignment Groups Weight
- Check box labeled, “Weight final grade based on assignment groups”
- Allocate percentages
- Click Save
To move an assignment to the appropriate category:
- Hover over the dots on the left side of the activity you’d like to move until your cursor changes to a crosshair.
- Click and drag the activity to the correct category.
Best Practices
A Gradebook is a Values Document
Assignment values are an expression of which student work you most value in the course. When an activity or a group of activities is worth a large proportion of the final score for a course, students naturally assume it is more important to their learning. Instructors can use this to emphasize which learning interactions are most valuable to a particular course’s learning outcomes.
Tips on Grade Weighting
Let’s imagine a course with activities comprised of discussions and essays.
For example, if discussions are twice as important as essays in the course, you might place all your discussions in a Discussion category worth 67% of the final grade, while your essays go in an Essay category worth 33% of the final grade.
However, it is possible to undermine the importance you place on each discussion if there are too many in one category. In the hypothetical course we’re imagining, a course with five discussions in the Discussions category would place a value of 13.4% of the final score on each assignment – a pretty significant impact! If there were 20 discussions in the exact same category, each assignment would be worth only 3.35% of the final score, which potentially invites students to skip some discussions.