Overview

Canvas allows you to organise your assessments into assignment groups (via the assignments index) and weight these assignment groups toward learner final grades (we recommend aligning your assignment groups with your course assessment plan).

How do assignment groups and weightings work? Why use them?

Before you set up your assignment groups and weight them, it's important to understand how they actually work. Weighted assignment groups give you greater control over how learner final grades are calculated. They act almost like a middle-man between individual assessment grades and that final grade.

For example, say you had four assessments all marked out of 100pts. Without weighted assignment groups, they'd all contribute 25% directly to the final grade (100 ÷ 400 = 25%). But, by putting individual assessments into assignment groups, you can make it so their contribution to the final grade is weighted by those assignment groups. For example, you could put one of these 100pt assessments into an assignment group weighted at 60% to make it contribute 60% of the final grade instead of 25%.

It's also important to note that the contribution of each assessment within an assignment group is based off of how many points it is marked out of. So, say you had three quizzes together in a single assignment group and that two were marked out of 50pts and one marked out of 100pts, the 100pt quiz would contribute twice as much to the assignment group's weighted grade compared to each individual 50pt quiz. They would not all contribute a third each (as shown in the table below).

Quiz #	Points	Weight of assessment towards group	Weight of assessment towards final grade
1	50	50 points in assessment ÷ 200 total points in group = 25% weight of assessment towards group	25% weight of assessment towards group × 20% weight of group towards course = 5% weight of assessment towards course
2	50	50 points in assessment ÷ 200 total points in group = 25% weight of assessment towards group	25% weight of assessment towards group × 20% weight of group towards course = 5% weight of assessment towards course
3	100	100 points in assessment ÷ 200 total points in group = 50% weight of assessment towards group	50% weight of assessment towards group × 20% weight of group towards course = 10% weight of assessment towards course

Note if you did actually want all three of these quizzes to contribute equally to the final course grade, you'd need to split them into their own assignment groups and weight those assignment groups equally. If your course doesn't have many assessments and/or if each of your assessments will be weighted differently, you'd likely end up having one assessment per assignment group anyway, which is perfectly fine.

How to create and weight assignment groups

Now you understand how weighted assignment groups work, it's time to set them up. All new courses will come with one assignment group by default, which may have weighting applied already, but you'll still need to set up a few more to align your course with your assessment plan. Work through the presentation below to find out more about setting these assignment groups up.

Select the expand button to open in full-screen or open in a new tab if not loading. Follow the navigational cues in the presentation to move between pages.

Assignment group rules

Assignment groups can be given additional (optional) rules to exclude assessments with the highest and/or lowest scores in the group from contributing to the assignment's groups weighted grade. You can set important assessments to never be excluded. This can be used to eliminate outlier grades in larger assignment groups (i.e., if you want to exclude your learners' worst of 10 quiz grades). For more information, please refer to the Canvas guide.

Return to homepage Get support Give feedback about this page