Canvas displayed wrong (inflated) grades all semester. What would you do?
I’m a TA and we just hit a weird situation at the end of the semester. Canvas had been showing every student a running final grade computed from unweighted totals instead of using the syllabus weights, so the number students were watching all semester was not the number the syllabus formula actually produces.
For context on the weights, the syllabus says exams are 50% of the grade (25% midterm, 25% final), lab reports are 20%, homework is 15%, and the remaining 15% is split across lab attendance, lecture attendance, discussion, and the final project. Under the unweighted Canvas display, all of those buckets get flattened together regardless of weight, which means a student could underperform on exams and still see a healthy grade because their attendance and discussion points were pulling the displayed number up.
The inflated number was what students saw going into both the midterm and the final, so some of them likely studied (or didn’t) based on a cushion that wasn’t actually there. The gap between what Canvas was showing and what the syllabus weights actually give comes out to about 8% on average across the class, and the worst affected student was inflated by 29%. Out of roughly 30 students, five would drop more than a full letter grade if we recompute it the correct way. Most of those five are students who did poorly on exams and were being carried by the lighter components.
The students’ case is that they watched these grades all semester, planned around them, and reverting now feels like the rug being pulled out. Our case is that the syllabus is what they signed up for on day one, exams are supposed to be half the grade for a reason, and honoring the inflated display means students who underperformed on the things the course is actually built around get rewarded over students who did the work the syllabus asked for.
What would you do?