Three Ways to do extra credit

There are several approaches instructors can adopt to can give students extra credit in Canvas using Assignments:

• awarding extra points for an existing Assignment– or for a Discussion or a Quiz
• creating an Assignment worth zero points
• providing extra credit using weighted assignment groups

Award extra points to graded items

First, you can always add extra points to graded items such as Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes in the Canvas grade book. You can do this by typing new values directly into the cells while you are looking at the overview of the grade book. For Quizzes only, you can use the Fudge Points feature in the SpeedGrader as an alternative. Be sure to click the button to update grades when issuing fudge points for a Quiz.

Assignments worth zero points

Instructors can create new assignments with zero points possible. After students complete the extra credit work, these Assignments should be graded and points should be awarded– even though the Assignment itself should stay set at 0 points.

The Assignment has to be set to zero points so that students who opt out of doing extra credit aren’t penalized. The grade book automatically totals the points from all graded, published items in the course – so if the Assignment did have points, all students’ overall grades as calculated by Canvas would be impacted.

Weighted Assignment Groups

Assignment Groups provide a means for organizing and working with multiple Assignments. Not only can instructors use Assignment Groups to weight the final grade, but since the total percentage of all assignment groups can be set above 100%, it’s possible to create an Assignment Group that houses extra credit Assignments.

The Canvas Guides explain the ins and outs of using this approach here

*Thanks to Gabrielle Orsi (Gabrielle.Orsi at lwtech.edu) for her help on this document.

Last Updated July 18, 2017