If a quiz has questions of the type you need to grade yourself, because Canvas can’t grade them automatically, it’s best to set a manual posting policy for that quiz in the Grades tool. Otherwise students checking on their grades before you’re done grading that quiz will see a confusing mix of information which can easily be misread to say that they bombed the quiz. See the steps for setting posting policies, and posting, below.

In Detail

There are types of quiz question Canvas can grade and types Canvas can’t grade. If a  quiz includes questions of the latter sort, it will hold whole submissions in an ungraded state until someone with “Teacher” role reviews the answers for those questions and assigns points for them. But what this ungraded state looks like to a student is a little different in different places that a student can look, and the differences can be confusing or alarming.

The Grades tool will report a new grade to the student in the form of a “badge” floating next to the tool on the course menu. When the student actually visits the Grades tool, the quiz will be an item on their list of grades, but instead of a number in the numerator it will have a (rocket ship) quiz icon. Hovering over the icon will pop up a message: “Instructor has not posted grade”.

However, if you have the Assignments tool enabled for students, and the student visits the tool after taking such a quiz but before their submission has been graded in full, the quiz will show a number in the numerator which includes zero points for the questions Canvas couldn’t grade. If half the questions on a 100-point quiz were questions Canvas can’t grade, the highest a student would see under Assignments would be 50/100. If all the questions were of a type that Canvas can’t grade, the student will see 0/100. And there’s no popup message to explain.

When a student looks back at their own not-fully-graded submission, either from the link in the Grades tool or the link in the Assignments tool (or from anywhere else) things aren’t entirely cleared up. There are numerous notations that some questions have not been graded, including on each specific question. But there are also numerous notations that the “score” for the attempt is a specific number based on the ungraded questions having a score of zero. If the student is already alarmed by the time they get to this view, it may not ease their mind at all.

The best approach to prevent this scenario is to switch the posting policy for the grades for such a quiz from “Automatic” (which is the default) to “Manual”.

The Steps

To Set a Manual Posting Policy on Grades for an Assignment

1. On the course menu, click the Grades item.
2. On the column heading for the quiz, click the vertical ellipsis menu.
3. Click the Grade Posting Policy item.
4. Click the Manually radio button so that it has the heavy ring.
5. Click the Save button.

To Post Grades for an Assignment with a Manual Posting Policy

1. On the course menu, click the Grades item.
2. On the column heading for the quiz, click the vertical ellipsis menu.
3. Click the Post grades item.
4. If you haven’t graded all the submissions yet, but you want to post the grades for the submissions you have graded, click the Graded radio button so that it has the heavy ring.
5. Click the Post button.

The basics are these – use a real computer rather than a mobile device. Don’t use Safari. And enable those cookies! Head over to the complete page for more info. You can even link it in your course.

Note: To set the default for any New Recordings look at the following:

If you do not want students to have to put in a password to access your recordings, you can do so by going into your Zoom settings and setting the ‘Require password to access shared cloud recordings’ to ‘Off’. You can access this setting at https://jccc.zoom.us/profile/setting?tab=recording

We have a new “How to” guide with more detail and screen shots.

How to: Control Password Protection by Default for Zoom Cloud Recordings

Note: To change existing recordings to no longer require a password look at the following:

1. Look for Recordings tab on the left side of the screen.
2. For each recording listed there will be a Share or More option on the right (click share)
3. Change the password protect option to the off position.
4. Close the window.

If you don’t know how to find the password that has already been put on a recording – you can find it in the ‘Share’ settings in your recordings list, as shown here:

First, the Menu will look a smidge different:

The menu items will be blue. There will be a black line next to the page you’re looking at. There will be no more ambiguous shading, but you will see eye-strikethrough icons that indicate what students can and cannot see. These icons are a visual tool only, though. If you want to make a navigation link visible/invisible to students, you still must go to the Navigation tab in Settings.

Next–there’s been a change of heart in Grades. The red eyeballs are going away and you’ll now be able to tell at a glance which of your classes has a manual posting policy.

Automatic Posting Policy: Grades will be visible to students as soon as they are entered. This is the default policy.

Manual Posting Policy: Grades will be hidden until you decide to post them.

Manual policies will now be visible in the column after the name of the assignment. Automatic policies will have no indicator. Grades that are hidden will continue to have the eyeball.

In order to change the policy, you can use the assignment menu in each column OR you can change the default for all assignments by using the gear/settings icon in Grades.

If you’re still confused – check out this video. If you still don’t get it, feel free to give us a call at the Ed Tech Center x3842.

We get a lot of questions about adding people to courses and YOU can do it, too! Below you’ll find a handy video on how to do it. And here are some links for more information about it.

What user roles and permissions are available in Canvas?

How do I add users to a course?

So–if you’ve been muting grades, know that the new terminology is to Hide Grades. It follows then that Unmute grades is now Post Grades. Confused yet? Check out this short video on making this work and the new options you have–such as changing the default instead of the painstaking process of muting 45 columns.

Click here for the guide. 

When we know more, we’ll create a handy How-To guide here on our website. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to stop by the Ed Tech Center or give us a call!