Canvas: Grades (Grade Book)

What does it do?

The Grades tool helps instructors easily view and enter grades for students. Depending on the Grade display type, grades for each assignment can be viewed as points, percentage, complete or incomplete, GPA scale, or letter grade.

Only graded assignments, graded discussions, graded quizzes, and graded surveys that have been published display in the Gradebook. Not Graded assignments are not included.

Canvas gradebook

The top of the Gradebook includes sorting options and settings you can use to organize your Gradebook [1], which will populate the select student data [2] and assignment data [3].

How do I make one?

The Canvas gradebook is automatically created, and automatically populated as you create assignments, quizzes and discussions. Refer to this Canvas Instructor Guide to learn more about Grades in Canvas.

Best Practices

Before grading an assignment, turn off the auto grade notification, by setting the assignment's Grade Posting Policy to "Manually". This way, you can add and edit the grades all you want, without any student seeing their grade before you are ready to release all grades at once.
Use SpeedGrader to quickly and conveniently mark up documents that have been submitted by students.
There are several ways to apply extra credit Links to an external site. to assignments and quizzes in the gradebook.

Example Use Case

An instructor has begun grading 47 final exams. It will take a couple days to finish the task. He doesn't want any student receiving a grade until all grading is complete. How can this be accomplished?

Here's how to do it:

After creating the "final exam" assignment, it will appear in the Canvas gradebook.
Go to Grades.
Locate the column representing that "final exam".
In the header of that column, click on the down-arrow or the three-dot ellipsis.
Select Grade Posting Policy.
In the side panel on the right, select the option "Manually".
Then select "Save". (You may need to scroll down to see the Save button.)
Now, enter grades and make any desired adjustments, with confidence that the students are not going to be notified of any of it.
When finished with the grading task, return to Grades, and -- from the same drop-down menu -- select "Post Grades".