Assignment Marking and Feedback – FAQs

• Canvas offers a range of assessment options, including standard assignments, peer assessment, group assignments, non-submission and non-graded assignments, as well as graded and non-graded discussions. Studio assessments (such as presentations), quizzes, and exams are also available.
  
  In addition, assessments can be delivered through external LTIs, such as Cadmus, PeerScholar, Buddycheck, and PebblePad. 

• Assessment evidence can take a variety of forms. Common examples include written assignments and academic papers, media such as Studio or YouTube videos, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, webpage links, wikis, ePortfolios, academic posters, creative artwork and images, podcasts, reflective journals, and witness or observation reports.

• Each assignment/quiz/discussion has a Publish button. 
• Students cannot see or submit until it is published. 
• Once students submit, you cannot “unpublish” — you must use availability dates instead.

Yes. You can use the ‘👓View as Student’ button in the top right corner of Canvas. 

Yes – but only if there are no student submissions to the assignment. 

Yes.  When creating an assignment, you can choose to base it on collaboration groups (Group Sets). This enables submissions to be made, marked, and graded either as group work or individually, depending on your setup.

Digital Discovery Series – Creation and Management of Groups in Canvas

Depending on the number of students on a Canvas course, there are several ways to assign work to specific students or groups. Administrative sections can be used to group students – particularly useful for large cohorts – while Differentiation Tags can support groups requiring anonymity (e.g. DASS students).  

These groups can then be used with the Assign to feature in Canvas (with specific dates and times) to release activities or resources to selected students.

Assignments: Use “Edit → Assign to” or “+ Add” to set alternative dates for specific students. 

Quizzes: Use “Moderate this quiz” to add extra time, attempts, or access windows. 

Discussions: Same method as Assignments 

Yes – unless you manage visibility using:

• 1. Grade Posting Policy (manual or automatic) 
• 2. Mute/unmute (Grade Posting Policy) 
• 3. Hide/Show Grades 

Yes. You can use the Submission Attempts setting in the assignment options to control how many times students can submit. You can allow unlimited attempts or set a specific limit. Once the maximum number of attempts has been reached, no further submissions are allowed.

Yes. You can:

• Create groups via the People → Groups area 

• Enable “This is a group assignment” 

• Choose whether everyone receives the same grade or individual grades 

Canvas includes the Turnitin Plagiarism Framework LTI within the assignment settings. Once you select a submission type (e.g. online submission, text entry, or file upload), the Turnitin option becomes available to enable.

Yes.  There are 2 ways to anonymise student names in Canvas SpeedGrader.  

In the assignment settings select ‘Graders cannot view student names’ from the Anonymous Grading option.  

In SpeedGrader, select the cog in the top left, Options, select ‘Hide student names in SpeedGrader’. 

Common types: 

• File uploads (PDF, Word, etc.) 

• Online text entry 

• Media recordings 

• URL submissions 

• Group submission 

• External tools (Turnitin, Panopto, PebblePad, etc.) 

The Due Date and Time are the date and time when the assignment is due.  Student assignments submitted after the due date will be marked as late in the Gradebook. 

Available From is the date and time when the Assignments will become available to students. Students cannot view assignment content until after this date has passed. 

Until date and time is when students can no longer submit the assignment.   

What is the difference between assignment due dates and availability dates? – Instructure Community

Yes.  If no Until date is set, students can continue to submit after the Due date, but their work will be marked as late. If an Until date is set after the Due date, students can submit up to that point, with any submissions after the Due date still recorded as late. You can also set agreed extensions for individual students by assigning them separate availability dates.

Yes. Staff with admin privileges can submit work on behalf of students from the Gradebook. 

How do I submit an assignment on behalf of a student as an instructor? – Instructure Community 

Yes and No.  

Yes – instructor inline comments (annotations on the actual student work) can be anonymous. 

No – final assignment submission comments are not anonymous. The name and date stamp will appear for these comments and the grade. 

Yes. When the Moderation option is selected in the assignment settings, moderation can be undertaken for quality assurance marking, second marking and blind second marking.  

However, Canvas is currently restricted to a maximum of 10 markers per assignment (submissions). Further markers over this maximum will have access but will be read only, and therefore will not be able to record comments or grades.

The blind second marking setting is linked to the moderation setting. When moderation is enabled, blind second marking is enabled. However, this will again be subject to the maximum markers limit (of 10). Second markers can mark student submissions without seeing the name of the first marker, but they will be able to view the inline comments (annotations) throughout the work. 

Yes – filtering is enabled when Sections have been created and students allocated to them. If Differentiation Tags have been used, filtering can be achieved via the Gradebook, rather than from SpeedGrader. 

No. QuickMarks held in Turnitin cannot be migrated to Canvas due to incompatibilities in file formats. 

Yes. Canvas SpeedGrader has a comment library which can store assignment submission comments. It cannot however, store inline (annotation) comments.  

As an alternative, there is a Chrome Extension called AnnotatePRO that can imitate the Turnitin QuickMarks feature. 

When anonymous marking is enabled, staff cannot see who has submitted via the Gradebook, as the assignment column is greyed out. However, you can access this information by going to Course Analytics, selecting Reports, and running the Missing Assignments report. This will generate a CSV file of all submissions, which can then be filtered as needed.

Yes. Go to the Course Analytics, Select Reports, and run the report ‘Late Assignments’. This will download a CSV file of all late student submissions, which can then be filtered further. 

Grades and comments can be released to students in 3 ways:

Manual – grades and comments are released to students simultaneously by a nominated person. Best for summative assessment in which moderation will take place. 

Automatic – grades and comments are released to students as each submission is marked. Probably best for some formative assessments. 

Date Released – grades and comments are released to students based on a recorded date for each. 

Yes – The similarity score will display in the top right corner of SpeedGrader. 

The University policy is that students should not see their similarity score for summative assessments. However, for a limited number of formative assessments and trial runs, the option can be enabled. 

Rubrics exist at the course level and can be accessed and edited by any instructor with an enrolment on that course.

When wanting to copy a rubric to another course, use the Copy To function to create a separate/unlinked rubric in your other course. 

Yes – by enabling the “Use this rubric for assignment grading” setting. When enabled, each rubric criteria must be assigned a score.

The marker will then complete the rubric as usual, and once submitted, the final grade is automatically calculated based on the total score.

When the instructor selects that score range, the given score will default to the upper end of that range. If wanting to assign a custom score within that range (e.g. 6 points), the points field can be manually edited. 

Technically, no – Canvas does not support percentage weighting of rubrics. However, they can be adapted to work with the points-based system in Canvas, whereby proportional point values are assigned to each criterion within the rubric. 

Once point values have been determined for each criterion, you can then customise the individual performance levels within each one by assigning point values as normal. 

Yes. When a rubric is created and added to an assignment, you can set it to Unscored from the scoring drop-down menu in Edit mode. The rubric can then be used during marking to select criteria and add comments where needed, but no points are assigned. The overall mark for the assessment is entered manually based on these judgements.

Where there is more than one marker, only a single rubric is used for the submission. Depending on established practice, the first marker may add inline comments (annotations) but not complete the rubric at this stage. The second marker can also add inline comments where appropriate. Following discussion and agreement between the markers, the first marker then completes the rubric.