10 Hacks to Reduce Grading Time in Canvas
by Amanda Dills
Grading open-ended assignments or quizzes in Canvas can get….tedious. Especially when you are grading a lot of individual student responses manually.
While the BEST way to reduce your overall grading time is to make changes to how your course or individual assignments are designed BEFORE the assignment or course is published to students (more on that in future in blog posts), there are certain tricks and hacks that you can use to speed up your grading NOW, without doing any course or assignment redesign whatsoever.
Each of these shortcuts should save you at least a second or two per assignment per student, which can really add up to huge time savings when multiplied times the number of students and assignments, over the duration of your course or term.
Ready to start saving time while grading? Then let’s dive in!
Hack #1: Shift-Scroll to scroll horizontally in the Gradebook.
I recently learned about this shift-scroll trick, and while it works on many different websites or programs (anything that requires horizontal scrolling – I’m looking at you, Excel spreadsheet), it comes in ESPECIALLY handy in the Canvas gradebook. Rather than having to locate the horizontal scroll bar in order to scroll your gradebook window to the right or left, simply hold down the SHIFT key and then scroll like normal with your mouse. Instead of scrolling vertically through the page, you’ll now be scrolling horizontally.
Hack #2: Gradebook Filters
Gradebook filters are one of my favorite time-saving tools in the Canvas Gradebook. Assuming you have either Sections, Modules, or Assignment Groups or both set up as an organizational structure in your course, you can turn on Gradebook Filters to show ONLY one Section, Module, or Group at a time. (Contact your ID3 Specialist if you would like help setting these up in your course.) You can turn on these filters by going to the View menu > Filters, and clicking on the filter you would like to enable. (I recommend turning on all 3.)
Then use the drop down menus that appear above the grade spreadsheet to filter by whichever option makes the most sense for you. Click HERE for a video that explains this process in more detail. (Plus, it also shows the Shift-Scroll tip above in action.)
Hack #3: Emojis in Assignment (or Module) Titles
This is another one of those hacks that works in lots of different websites and programs, but it is especially helpful for Grading. You can use a combination of shortcut keys to open up an Add-an-Emoji Menu that allows you to add emojis to Canvas Module, Assignment, or Assignment Group titles. These emojis not only add some fun personality and color to your Canvas course, but they also make it really easy to find and differentiate between different elements in your course. For example, the Assignment Groups in this course shown below are labeled with different emojis which makes it very easy to differentiate between them in the Assignment Group Filter Menu
In particular, I like using simple colored shape emojis (like these: 🟦, 🔴,💚,🟨) to make things look really clean and clear. To open up the emoji menu on your computer, press [window key] and [.] on a PC or [Control, Command, Space] on a Mac. Click HERE for a video that explains this process in more detail.
Hack #4: Sorting Students in Speed Grader
The Canvas SpeedGrader is a great tool for grading students and giving feedback, but there are some settings you can change to make it even more speedy. Click HERE for a video that shows more detail regarding the next few SpeedGrader Settings hacks. To change these settings for an assignment, click on the gear menu that appears in the upper left hand corner of your SpeedGrader screen, and select “Options.”
From here, you can choose to Sort the student list in a variety of ways, including one that puts students who have submitted assignments at the top. This can be especially helpful if you have a large class list with students who are submitting different assignments at different times.
Hack #5: Speed Grader Keyboard Shortcuts
Another awesome option you can find in the SpeedGrader Settings Menu is a window that shows various Shortcut Keys you can use within SpeedGrader. These Shortcuts are as follows:
- j = Next Student
- k = Previous Student
- c = Leave Comment
- g = Change Grade
- r = Use Rubric
If you use the SpeedGrader tool a lot, you may want to put these shortcut keys on a post-it note so you can use them to save a ton of mouse clicks while grading!
(Click HERE for a video that shows all the SpeedGrader Settings Hacks in more detail.)
Hack #6: Speed Grader Comment Library
If you use the Comment feature in SpeedGrader, you already know that it can be a great way to provide personalized feedback to students, in a place that’s easy and obvious for them to access (their overall grades page).
If, while using the SpeedGrader Comment field, you find yourself writing the same comments over and over again, you may want to utilize the SpeedGrader Comment Library. With this tool, you can save your commonly-used feedback comments in an easy-to-reuse location.
Access the Comment Library by clicking on the tiny “Speech Bubble” icon above the “Add A Comment” field; from here you can save new comments the library or select the one you want to add. You can also turn on an auto-fill option that causes comments from your library to pop up as you type.
Click HERE for a video that explains this feature in more detail.
Hack #7: Type Directly in Gradebook (Using Arrow Keys)
But what if you don’t need to record comments or anything else while grading? What if you just need to record a simple score? In that case, you can save lots of time by bypassing SpeedGrader altogether and just typing your score directly into the Gradebook Spreadsheet itself.
To do this, go to the Grades area of your course, click your mouse into the first cell where you want a grade to appear, and type your score. Then click ENTER or RETURN to move vertically down to the next student.
Hot tip: You can also move from grade cell to cell in any direction (horizontally or vertically) by using the ARROW keys on your keyboard.
(NOTE: All grades auto-save in the Canvas Gradebook, so while you do have to hit “Submit” for Comments or Rubric results, you do not have to do anything to save what goes in the actual grade cell.)
Hack #8: “EX” Grades
Looking for a way to indicate that a student is exempt from a particular assignment in the gradebook?
While there are other ways to do this on the “front end” of the assignment (to actually prevent the student from accessing the submission portal for that assignment), while you’re in the process of grading you can simply use the letters “EX” in a gradebook cell to indicate that the student is Excused or Exempt.
Typing EX in the cell will cause the grade to show as “EXCUSED,” both to teachers and students. Click HERE to see a video about this in more detail.
Hack #9: Grade All Students at Once
What if you want to assign the same grade to every (or almost every) student at once? You can do this with a technique that Canvas calls “Default Grades.”
To set the “default” grade for an assignment, click on the 3-dot snowman icon that appears when you hover your mouse over a column in the Gradebook. Then click and select “Set Default Grade.”
From here you can type in whatever grade you want to assign to EACH student. You can choose to overwrite or leave any scores currently in the column.
(So, if you know that only a few students are going to receive a grade that is NOT the “default” you are assigning to most students, I would suggest typing in the “outlier” grades first and then using the Default Grade function to fill in the rest of the students’ grades.)
Hack #10: Conclude Extra Students
This final hack doesn’t relate to Grades specifically, but if you have students cycling in and out of your course throughout a term, it can be very helpful in making your Gradebook feel more streamlined.
By Concluding students from the “People” menu of your course you can remove them from your course gradebook (and remove the course from their Canvas Dashboard) without actually losing any grade data they have accumulated.
To do this, click on the name of the student on the People tab, and then click on their name AGAIN in the little pop up window that appears on the side of the screen. From here you will see a page where you can Restore or Conclude their course enrollment.
(If you see the word “Restore,” click on that first.)
Then click on the word “Conclude” to remove the student from the class list and gradebook. Click HERE for a video that explains this process in more detail.
This concludes our list of 10 Hacks you can use today to speed up your Canvas grading process. What other hacks would you add to this list? Share them in the Comments area below.
And please let us know if you have any questions related to any of the topics covered in this article.
