Letter Grades in your Canvas Courses
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Instructors can use customizable grading schemes in their courses to convert points or percentages into letter grades, which can be displayed instead of or in addition to numeric scores.
Grading schemes (letter grades) are built based on points and percentage ranges, and each percentage range is assigned a name value. You can create any type of grading scheme by editing the name and percentage range for each item.
Things to Note:
- Canvas uses the upper values of the grading scheme, not the median of the range, when calculating letter grades. For example, if a grading scheme specifies that a grade of B is 85-89%, Canvas will use 88% to calculate the actual Letter or GPA grade in the database.
- If instructors care about the distinction between A and A- then Georgetown recommends you do not use letter grades. For example, a student with five B+ and one A letter grades will result in the the gradebook’s total column displaying an A- for the student’s final course grade. Put another way, a student with one A and one B will result in the gradebook’s total column displaying a final grade that equals an A.
- For instructors who want to use letter grades, first check the course level (or assignment) letter grade scheme and make sure it matches your syllabus.
A grading scheme can be applied at the course level and/or for a specific assignments.
- Enabling a grading scheme at the course level will add letter grades in addition to numeric scores to the students’ total column in the gradebook.
- Grading schemes can be enabled on specific assignments, which can display letter grades instead of or in addition to numeric scores. When applying a grade scheme to specific assignments only, and not at the course level, a letter grade will not appear in the total column in the gradebook.
- In both cases, and by default, percentage points are displayed next to the letter grade for instructors and students to see. If you wish to hide the percentage points and only show the letter grade you will need to take the additional step to enable “Restrict View of Quantitative Data” in the course settings.
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