It is recommended that Canvas be used for all assignments and grading for your courses. Consistent use of these tools across all courses will help students be as successful as possible.

Create Graded Assignments

To create a gradebook item you create an assignment and Canvas then automatically creates a place in the grade book for that assignment. Setting points/percentages, weighting grades, dropping the lowest grade, etc. is all done in the Assignments Tool.  The Grades Tool reflects the settings you set in Assignments. 

TIP: When you publish an assignment it will appear in the assignment list at the bottom of the Syllabus page. If you don’t want students to see the assignment yet set an “available from” date in the Assignment settings.

 Canvas Guide on Assignments and Assignments Video Script  

Grade Assignments with SpeedGrader 

SpeedGrader is a tool that allows you to rapidly move through assignments, grading and leaving comments (including comments directly on the submitted document).  You can use it to grade assignments, including those with Rubrics, in many different formats including MS Word docs, PDFs, Excel sheets, PowerPoint files, and video.

TIP: Before you start grading in SpeedGrader, click the “Mute Assignment” link at the top right so that students will not see their grades and feedback until you have completed the grading for the class and “unmuted” the assignment.

Canvas Guide for SpeedGrader and SpeedGrader Overview Script. 

Use New Quizzes  

The New Quizzes feature in Canvas will permanently replace the Quizzes feature in December 2020.  As of now, it is recommended that you enable this feature in your individual courses and build all quizzes using this tool from this point forward.  Please see this documentation for instructions on how to use New Quizzes. 

The content found here was designed by Indiana University and adapted for use by the Institute for Faculty Development at Vanguard University. This content is offered under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license and should be considered under this license unless otherwise noted. The original content was imported from “Designing and Teaching for Impact in Online Courses” from within Canvas Commons.