Managing Grades & Attendance in Canvas: What Faculty Need to Know

Maintaining grades and attendance in Canvas

Every semester instructors are required to maintain grade and attendance data in Canvas. This includes online, hybrid, and on-campus, i.e., face-to-face, courses. Before we begin, here are two important notes:

• It all starts with assignments: Before entering grades you will have to create an assignment to hold those grades. Everything you see in you Canvas Gradebook will be a reflection of every published assignment in your course. For more information, here is an assignment overview.

• On-Campus Courses: Before you can enter grades in your Canvas grade book, make sure you have set-up the corresponding assignments in your course. Since most coursework will happen Face-to-face, when entering grades in Canvas, you will need to create an assignment shell for all assignments in a semester.
• Once published, these assignment shells will appear in your grade book as individual columns that will allow you to enter grades into the Canvas grade book for all students in your course.

GRADES

Watch this video for an overview of the Canvas grade book:

When working with grades, it is critical that all grades are entered for each student. If there is an empty grade entry and your intention is for a student to receive a zero, make sure you input a zero. By default, ungraded assignments are NOT included in any assignment total calculations. This means that when assignments are left as "ungraded" (shown with a '-' dash), they are treated as if they never happened. Do not leave any grade entry empty. This will make sure that you are calculating final grades correctly. For large classes where missed assignments are common, there is a shortcut. In the dropdown list of any grade book column, you can use the "Set Default Grade" option to enter zeros for any ungraded assignments. (See, How do I set a default grade for an Assignment?) Make sure to not overwrite already-entered grades when setting a default grade. Best practice, then, is to make sure that zeros get entered along with other scores, leaving no "ungraded" dashes once an assignment is complete in your course.

Learn more about maintaining grades in Canvas

ATTENDANCE

• Learn more about maintaining attendance in Canvas
• Learn how attendance is handled in the Canvas gradebook

By default, taking Attendance will place an assignment worth 100 points named Roll Call in your course. You can click the Roll Call Attendance column header in the grade book to edit the point value for this assignment. You can also make the assignment worth no points if you prefer. Currently, attendance can only be expressed as a percentage.

Please note that if you edit the point value of the Attendance assignment, do not edit the assignment name or delete the assignment. If you edit the Attendance assignment name or delete that assignment, Canvas will be unable to automatically grade attendance.

For more information, take a look at taking attendance in Canvas.