Canvas for Faculty

This page provides information on Canvas' grade navigation, grading options, and using the gradebook and SpeedGrader in Canvas.

• For more information about Grades and the Gradebook, check out the Canvas "What are Grades and the Gradebook?" guide.
  • For specific "How Do I" Grades and the Gradebook instructions, check out the Grades Canvas Guides.
• For more information about the SpeedGrader, check out the Canvas "What is SpeedGrader?" guide.
  • For specific "How Do I" instructions, check out the SpeedGrader Canvas Guides.

The first decision most instructors need to make is to determine their course's Grade Posting Policy. There are two options.

• First, you can have it to where your grades (and comments) are posted immediately upon being set. This is called Automatic Posting and is the default in all Canvas courses. As soon as you add a grade or a comment to a student's submission, they can see it and may be notified (depending on their settings).
• Second, you can set it to manual posting. With this policy, your grades will post only when you select the Post Grades option in the Gradebook. Until then, the score will show to the student as a crossed out eye.

It is important to note that changing the grade posting policy for the course will not change the grade posting policy for any assignments created before the change was made. The grade posting policy only affects new assignments. If an assignment was created under the Automatic grade posting policy it will remain automatic unless you change it to manual manually.

This, of course, means that you can change the grade posting policy for each individual assignment as well. In fact, many instructors leave the course grade posting policy set to Automatic, but they change individual assignments that they want more control over in releasing the grades to Manual. This can be especially helpful if you have an assignment where you give feedback (or comments) on before all of the students have submitted their work. 

This can get kind of confusing if you switch an assignment from automatic to manual after you start putting in grades. The first students will have received their grades but any that were set (or changed) after you made the change to manual posting, will be hidden. Add to that, you can also choose to "recall" grades by hiding them. If hidden, changes will be shown depending on the assignments grade posting policy.

Canvas has a grade visibility flowchart found here to help with that workflow and, if there are any questions, please free to reach out to Educational Technology for one-on-one assistance.

Grading Schemes within Courses in Canvas are very useful. They use a pre-defined formula to assign a letter grade to a points or percentage scale. This benefits the faculty at Marian because it allows easy conversion of the course's final grade to a letter that can be input into MU-HUB at the midterm and semester.

Instructors can align their grading scheme to one of the pre-built ones or the Educational Technology team can create a custom grade scheme for individual instructors or departments. If departments want a single grading scheme automatically applied to all courses within their sub-account, the Ed Tech team can also assist with that. Reach out to Educational Technology for assistance.

In general, there are two steps to using a grading scheme within Canvas.

1. Enable a grading scheme by going to the Course Settings and checking the "Enable course grading scheme" box.
   
2. Select (or create) a grading scheme that aligns with your syllabus.

You can verify what the grading scheme consists of by selecting one and then clicking View. If none of the default ones align to what you want to use, contact Educational Technology.