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Canvas for Faculty

Your home for assistance and resources for Marian University's learning management system, Canvas.

Grades, Grading, and the Gradebook

This page is dedicated to Frequently Asked Questions regarding Canvas' Grades navigation, Grading options, and using the Gradebook in Canvas. For general information about grades, see the Canvas guides for the Grades section here, or the SpeedGrader section here.

Grade Visibility Questions

Some of the most common types of questions that we receive are based on when the grades are visible to students. Some of these questions are: What does it mean to hide grades? Why can some students see grades and others cannot? Why are my students able to see grades before I want them to?

To answer these, we have created a document (check out the Grade Posting Policy here) to hopefully help Instructors understand the two options for posting grades and what exactly "Hide Grades" does. Canvas also has a grade visibility flowchart found here.

Applying and/or Changing the Grade Scale

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 Blake Ide 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 which grading scheme 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 Blake.