Grouping and Weighting Assignments

Assignments can be organized into groups. With assignment groups, students can see how they are doing on individual assignments, and also how they are doing on the entire group of assignments. This feedback can help students see how they are doing at a glance, and also where in the course they may need to focus more energy.

Now that you have assignment groups, you can apply rules designed to handle exceptions you want to make to the final grade calculation. For example, you can drop the lowest score or the highest score in a group. You can also tell Canvas to never drop a specific assignment score. If your groups are weighted, Canvas knows that the lowest score is not only a number, but that it is also based on the weight of the assignment group. Canvas will always drop the score that helps students the most.

Assignment groups are columns in the gradebook. If the groups are weighted, then weighted percentages will be automatically calculated, saving you and your students time. Note that using weighted groups automatically shifts your Total column display from points to percentage because group weights are all based on percent.

In order to give more weight to some assignments over others, you must create assignment groups and group equally-weighted assignments together. Notice that on the Assignments index page, you always have one group by default, called "Assignments." If you do not add additional groups, then all assignments taken together are equal to 100% of the student grade, and the weight of each assignment is determined by the assignment's point value. If you want to weight assignments by category, such as Essays, Exams, Homework, etc., first create the groups you want, then drag like assignments into each group. Finally, assign weights to each group. All groups should add up to 100%.

One method of giving students extra credit is to award additional points when grading. In quizzes you can award extra credit by giving fudge points. You can also give extra credit using a rubric. So there are a number of ways to give extra credit when grading.

With assignment groups, you can create an extra credit group that will allow you to add extra credit assignments as you go, placing those assignments in the extra credit group. This way, extra credit will be calculated based on how well students do on any number of grouped assignments taken as a whole up to the percent of the grade, such as 5%, that you want to award for extra credit. This flexibility is nice, especially because the actual amount of extra credit awarded will never exceed the percentage you assign to the group, and you won't have to worry about the calculations.

Be aware of two things when using an extra credit group to award extra credit:

1. You cannot get an accurate calculation with a 0 point assignment in an extra credit group. Using the percentage calculation would require division by 0, which does not work. Extra credit assignments in an extra credit group must have a point value.
2. You will not see extra credit clearly reflected until all grades are in. Canvas has no way of knowing when students finish their extra credit work, and so if a student has 5% extra credit work turned in, and still has a final exam worth 20% of the course grade, the 5% extra credit shows up above 80% of the grade that is in, not above 100%. Once 100% of the scores are in, then the 5% extra will show up above 100%.