Entering letter grades for student assignments

All graded assignments must be worth a certain point value so that the Canvas Grades tool can calculate the overall course grade. If you’d like to give students a letter grade for an assignment, you can do so by setting up a grading scheme for the assignment. However, a numerical value must be associated with the letter.

Create a new assignment

  1. Click Assignments in your course. 
  2. Click +Assignment.
  3. Enter the total amount of points the assignment is worth.
  4. For Display Grade as, choose Letter Grade from the dropdown menu.
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  5. Here, you can select an existing grading scheme or create one of your own.

Grade Student Submissions

You can grade student submissions either through the Grades tool or through SpeedGrader. 

In Grades, you can manually type in a letter grade for each student and Canvas will automatically generate a numerical value based on the assignment's grading scheme.

Grades page with letter grades entered in an assignment column

In SpeedGrader, type the letter grade into the Grade box. Navigate to the next student and continue entering letter grades for each student.

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Please note that although you can assign letter grades, you will not be able to hide the total amount of "points" the students earned based on the letter grade. The grading scheme will take the highest point value of the letter range. For example, if an A- is < 94.0% to 90.0%, entering an A- will result in a 93% because that's the next whole number that is less than 94%.