To create the Provisional Mark column in Gradebook, you have create a no submission assignment:

1. Navigate to the Assignments page of the course.

2. Click on the +Assignment button.

3. Add the name 'Provisional Mark'

4. Optionally, you can choose to display grades as letters (a) and select the Grading Scheme that makes sense for your course (b):

5. Scroll down and select 'No submission' as the submission type:

6. Scroll down to save the assignment. The Provisional Mark column will appear in Gradebook.

Publish the assignment before adding the marks to its respective column in Gradebook. Post the grades when ready to make them available to the students.

What is the Student's View of a Letter Grade Provisional Mark?

With default settings, a student will see both the letter grade and the number you entered within the grade bands. If you entered a letter instead of a number, the student will see the highest value number of the grade band e.g. if a 'B' is 60-69, a student will see B(69).

You can try this out using Test Student, as in the example below:

test student provisional-1.PNG

In this example, the student has a 64.59%, and I have typed in 65 into the Provisional Mark column. The student's view of this is below:

student view1.PNG

However, if I type in B, instead, it will show the highest number in the grade band. In this case, that's 69. See the student's view when I type the letter B and no number below:

student view2.PNG

How do I restrict my student from seeing the number?

There are two options for making changes to restrict students from seeing the qualitative data.

Option 1: Set the provisional mark assignment to 0 points. Set the provisional mark assignment to 'letter grade'. Type in what you would wish students to see (letter grade, H1, etc). Students will see whatever you have typed in and a 0. It may be worth explaining to them that the 0 is not representative of their marks, but a workaround for the column to display their provisional mark. The mark will appear as in the example below:

example of provisional mark blurred.png

Option 2: You may choose to restrict quantitative data for the course as a whole by going to 'settings' and ticking the 'restrict quantitative data' box.

Please note that this sets every assignment to be viewed as a letter grade. This means that if you have any assignments that are NOT set to 'letter grade' display, they will show the Canvas default grading scheme, which is based on the American system (90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, etc).

Additionally, if you do not set Turnitin assignments in Canvas to 'display letter grade', they will show an 'F' by default, even if the column has not been posted to be visible to students. You must click into the assignment, then use the 'edit assignment' button at the top right, and change the display to 'letter grade' for all assignments before restricting quantitative data.

You may choose to untick the box and show students both letters and numbers at any time you choose.

It is also advised that, if you wish students to retain a copy of any numerical marks before you tick the restriction box, to consider sending them a message or announcement alerting them that from xx day, they will no longer see numerical marks and to screenshot them if they wish to have a copy, as all marks will convert to letters after xx date.