Pro Tip Tuesday – No More Mute Assignment – Welcome Grade Posting Policy!

Today’s Pro Tip Tuesday is highlighting a pretty great new tool that was released this past weekend that’s going to save you a lot of time and clicks if you use Canvas’ gradebook.

Canvas’ New Gradebook tool is doing away with our old friend “Mute Assignment” in favor of something even better, if you can imagine.

Grade Posting Policy

Once you move to New Gradebook, you’ll no longer have to manually “mute” each assignment column in order to hide in process grading from students. You can just apply the Manual Grade Posting Policy to your entire course.

How to use Grade Posting Policy

Click on the gear icon in the right-hand corner, and then click on the Grade Posting Policy tab.

The default setting is Automatically Post Grades – Assignment grades will be visible to students as soon as they are entered.

If you’ve used Mute Assignment in the past, you’ll want to select the setting for Manually Post Grades – Grades will be hidden by default. Any grades that have already posted will remain visible. Choose when to post grades for each assignment on each column in the gradebook.

Now, instead of having to mute each column individually, you can mute everything at once! Then, as you grade, you may selectively release the grades in each column as needed.

While the grades for an assignment are set to manual, students will not receive new notifications about or be able to see:

• Their grade for the assignment
• Grade change notifications
• Submission comments
• Curving assignments
• Score change notifications

Once a grade is posted manually, it will automatically send new notifications and be visible to students.

When a Manual Grade Posting Policy is enabled for your course, your gradebook column headings will display an outline “Eye” or “Visibility” icon:

This icon indicates that any grades added to the assignment are hidden from student view.

Once a submission has been graded, a shaded Visibility icon displays next to the assignment name:

When grades are hidden from student view, the Total column also displays the Visibility icon. This indicates that the total grade in the Gradebook differs from the total grade viewed by the student.

To release grades, click on the Options button on the desired assignment column and click on Post Grades:

You may post grades for the entire class or even section by section.

And that’s the basics on Grade Posting Policy, it’s definitely an improvement over Mute Assignment and I’m excited to try it out!

Check out the full documentation on Grade Posting Policy to learn more.

If you have any questions, as always, feel free to email us at canvashelp@wpi.edu.