There are many tasks involved in grading assessments and delivering grades to students. Below are our recommended steps for successfully delivering grades in Canvas.
End of Semester Grading
Finish grading assessments within Canvas. For grading online assignments or quizzes with essay questions, you will need to manually enter scores.
When using essay questions and allowing extra attempts on a Canvas Quiz (maybe to allow students to practice for an upcoming assessment), you will need to go in and manually grade each essay question in order for grades to properly display.
Add grades for assessments completed outside of Canvas. These may include On Paper, No Submission, and/or External Tool (Gradescope, Poll Everywhere, etc.).
If you have grades already organized in a spreadsheet, you can format it according to Canvas’ needs and import the grades into the Gradebook rather than manually entering them.
Decide how to deal with missing submissions. Do you want to exclude the assessment from grading, count it as zero, or automatically apply some other minimum score?
Canvas will exclude missing assignments from grade calculations unless you manually add zeroes or add a Missing Submission Policy.
Organize assessments into Assignment Groups in order to apply Weighted Grading or just to provide clarity as to which assessments count towards which grading categories.
If you need to apply extra credit, you can use an assignment in a special Assignment Group and then add a weight to that group that pushes the total over 100%.
Post grades, if you used a Manual Posting Policy.
Changing the posting policy after grades exist will not cause them to be posted. You must post grades for each assignment manually.
Determine if you will override grades that are automatically calculated by Canvas.
Final Grade Override is an optional feature in Canvas. To turn it on for a course, you will need to enable it as a Feature Option.
Confirm that grades are displaying properly.
Enter Student View to generate a Test Student in the Gradebook. You can then enter grades for the student (when out of Student View) and go back to Grades in Student View to see if the grades are properly displaying for students.
Export grades in order to format them into a document that can be imported into Faculty Center for official grading.
Canvas grades do not sync with the official registrar system. Final grades are entered in the grade roster (not Canvas Gradebook) in Faculty Center. See the registrar documentation for more details.
