Grade for Student Success
Thanks to your hard work in and out of the classroom, CU Boulder celebrated record-high undergraduate retention and graduation rates in 2023. Grade for Student Success emerged from faculty recommendations, with the goal of supporting our campus community and enabling success for our faculty and students.
This collaborative effort has resulted in the creation of 16 comprehensive guidelines, 14 new tutorials and 26 Canvas enhancement requests designed to promote efficiency, consistency and ease in the important work you’re doing.
The Canvas Grading Initiative Faculty Working Group
As part of the Buff Undergraduate Success (BUS) Initiative, a working group of nine faculty members joined the Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) and Office of Information Technology (OIT) to review problem statements from faculty and students about grading and propose solutions to improve the faculty and student experience with the Canvas gradebook.
Bobby Benim, Assistant Teaching Professor, Applied Mathematics
Daniel Bolton, Associate Teaching Professor, Physics
Al Bronstein, Teaching Assistant Professor, Mathematics
Ryan Curtis, Teaching Associate Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience
Jessica Gorski, Associate Faculty Director Health Professions RAP, Associate Teaching Professor EBIO and MCDB
Susan Hendrickson, Teaching Professor, Chemistry
Shaw Ketels, Lecturer, Psychology and Neuroscience
Sreesha Nath, Assistant Teaching Professor, Computer Science
Mark Valkovci, Teaching Assistant Professor, Economics, Student Academic Success Center
Dear Colleagues,
We hope your semester has been going well! As members of the Canvas Grading Faculty Working Group, we wanted to take a moment to share the resources that resulted from our work during the Fall 2023 semester to promote student-centered grading practices in Canvas. Our working group was part of the Canvas Grading Initiative, a collaboration between the Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) and Office of Information Technology (OIT) and endorsed by the Buff Undergraduate Success (BUS) Initiative.
Our working group discussed common pain points for students and faculty, and their solutions. These discussions were informed by our experiences teaching critical, high-enrollment courses for first- and second-year students in a wide variety of disciplines, and by what we learned from faculty interviews and student usability testing sessions.
We are excited to share two new resources: new recommendations for student-centered grading in Canvas and a set of faculty- and student-facing Canvas video tutorials to support the implementation of these guidelines. We hope these new resources will be helpful for your teaching (e.g., by making grading in Canvas more customizable and efficient), while supporting the success of all of our students (e.g., by ensuring their grades in Canvas are accurate, up to date and easy to find).
We encourage you to share these resources with your colleagues and discuss them within your department or unit.
If you have any questions or ideas to share, please contact the CTL@colorado.edu, whose team is continuing to work on the Canvas Grading Initiative and related initiatives to support CU faculty and students.
Faculty Perspectives on Grade for Student Success
In this video, faculty members share their perspectives on the benefits of implementing the Grade for Student Success guidelines in their own courses.
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- Include a complete schedule of assignments. By the first day of class, share a syllabus that includes a complete list of all assignments with due dates for the entire semester. Unless you are using an alternative approach to grading, you should also include the percentage of the final grade each assignment and group of assignments are worth. Students can plan ahead, set priorities and manage their time better when all of their responsibilities are clearly laid out. Canvas provides a central location for students to find this information for all their courses.
- Include grading policies. In your syllabus, include a clear explanation of all grading policies. This may include drop policies, late and partial credit policies, or attendance and participation policies, as well as the circumstances under which these policies apply.
- Provide multiple significant grades before the drop deadline. Design your courses to include several significant graded assignments or substantive feedback before the final drop deadline.* Providing early and frequent opportunities for assessment ensures students receive feedback on their learning and how to improve. It also empowers students to make informed decisions about whether to keep or drop a course.
- *For the fall and spring semesters, there are two drop deadlines:
- The last day for students to drop a course without penalty is Wednesday of the second week of classes. We recognize this may be too early in the semester for students to have received multiple significant grades.
- The final drop deadline is Friday of the 10th week of classes. That is the last day for students to drop a course with a penalty, upon which they are required to pay 100% of tuition and fees, and a “W” grade is posted to their transcript. By this date, students should have received multiple significant grades.
- *For the fall and spring semesters, there are two drop deadlines:
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Developing Your Canvas Courses
- Your syllabus and Canvas should be in alignment. Your syllabus and Canvas should include the same list of assignments, due dates, point value of each assignment and assignment group weightings, if applicable. There should be no inconsistencies between the syllabus and Canvas. If the course schedule changes as a result of a snow day or other unexpected event, please update your syllabus and Canvas accordingly and notify the students of whatever changes have been made.
- Build all assignment due dates into Canvas by the first day of classes. Whenever possible, add all assignments with due dates, correct point values and assignment group weightings, if applicable, by the first day of classes. Add placeholders with due dates if you have not developed all assignments yet or if certain types of assignments will accumulate throughout the semester, such as clickers. Set the “available from” date on each placeholder to a date in the future so students cannot access it until you’ve replaced it with the real assignment.
- Use Canvas, not an external program, to calculate total grades.
- If you are using a traditional points- or percentage-based approach to grading, do not hide the total grades. Whenever possible, set up Canvas to automatically create total and letter grades. If you must calculate grades in an external program, add an extra “assignment” to Canvas to create a new column in the gradebook where you can enter students’ current total grades. Update total grades regularly, such as every week.
- If you are using an alternative approach to grading, hide the total numeric grade that appears as a default in Canvas. Make sure you have not enabled a grading scheme in Canvas that will display inaccurate letter grades.
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Setting up Assignments in Canvas
- Use specific, meaningful and consistent assignment names. Assignment names in Canvas should be specific enough to indicate what the assignment is, clearly communicate to students the nature of the assignment, and adhere to consistent naming conventions within your course.
- Clearly communicate in the assignment description the mode of submission. For each assignment, select the appropriate submission type from the dropdown menu, such as online, on paper or through an external tool. If the assignment is a paper submission, include a detailed description of how and where students should submit their assignments. This may include providing the location and person to whom students must submit their assignments.
- Clearly communicate in the assignment description where to find feedback. Include a note in the assignment description explaining to students where they can find feedback on their work. This is especially important when external tools such as Gradescope contain the feedback.
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Communicating with Students About Grades
- Make your grading system explicit and transparent. Set aside time the first week of class to discuss your grading system, take a syllabus quiz or share another resource that explains your grading. Explain to students why you use a particular grading system, ideally in terms of how this will support their learning. Explain how you curve grades, if you plan to do so. Show students where they can find a list of all assignments that will count toward their final grade, the number of points or percentage each assignment is worth, grading policies, and cutoffs for different letter grades. This transparency allows students to understand what is expected of them, plan ahead, set priorities and manage their time.
- Explain weighted grade calculations, if applicable. If you attach weights to assignment groups, show your students an example demonstrating how to calculate the contribution of an individual assignment to their final grade. For example, you could explain that if five quizzes are worth 10% of the final grades, each individual quiz is worth 2% of their final grades.
- Tell students to trust the Canvas gradebook. Some CU Boulder students report they hear in 75% of courses that their total grades in Canvas are not accurate. We encourage you to actively tell students throughout the semester that the total grades in Canvas are accurate representations of where their grades are right now, given the assignments submitted and graded so far. However, you may note that the grades displayed are not necessarily good predictions of their final grades, which could change as they submit more work, complete extra credit or benefit from drop policies.
- Remind students of the drop deadline. Tell students to consult with their academic advisors if they are unsure what to consider when deciding whether to drop your course.
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Maintaining Your Canvas Courses Throughout the Semester
- Keep the gradebook up to date. Commit to ensuring the grades in the Canvas gradebook are as accurate as possible. Throughout the semester, enter all grades within one week of the deadlines to ensure students are receiving timely information about how to improve. If that is not possible, explicitly communicate to students when they will receive their grades. When assignments build on each other, make sure students receive feedback on one assignment before any subsequent assignments are due. The CTL, OIT and other campus units are developing resources to support instructors as they implement these practices.
- Sync grades from external tools regularly. Throughout the semester, regularly sync the Canvas gradebook with grades from any external tools or programs, such as Smartwork, Inquizitive or iClickers. Tell your students how often you will sync those grades.
- Replace blanks in the Canvas gradebook with zeros in a timely manner. When setting up the gradebook, set them to automatically change grades for missing assignments from blanks to zeros once the deadlines have passed. You may need to also share these expectations with teaching assistants and/or graders. Do not leave grades for missing assignments blank unless you really don’t want those assignments to count toward the students’ grades, in which case you can use the “excused” feature to show you’ve intentionally left them blank.