Giving extra credit in a Canvas course

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See this article from Canvas on how to give extra credit for more details.

Non-weighted grades

One way to give extra credit is to award bonus points in a simple point-based grading scheme. All of the assignments in your course total up to 125 points. The class is still out of 125 points, but a student could theoretically get 126 (or more) points in the class.

Examples of assigning extra credit are:

  • Awarding extra points to a regular assignment, ie, 11 out of 10.
  • Adding an extra credit assignment, out of 0 points, that you can assign points to, and it will be added to the total number of points for the course. This assignment could have a submission or no submission in Canvas.
  • Adding Fudge Points to a Canvas quiz
  • Adding extra credit points within a Canvas rubric

Weighted grades

Another way is to increase the points in a weighted grades group or the total percentage of the course.

Two examples of assigning extra credit are:

  • Adding an extra credit assignment, out of 0 points, in an assignment group will award extra points to that particular group of assessments.
    • For example, if your exams are worth 40% of the grade, you can add an extra credit assignment in the Exams group worth 0 points.  Any points awarded to that assignment will essentially be awarded to the exam scores as a whole.
  • Increasing the overall percentage possible in a course from 100% to greater than 100%. 
    • For example, assignments are worth 60% of the grade, and exams are worth 40% of the grade. Then you add an additional extra credit group to increase the total percentage in the course to over 100% (ex., 103%) (See Fig. 1). 
    • Any assignments in this group will add a portion, or all, of those additional percentage points to a student's grade.
    • With this method, students can theoretically get a 100% in the course without completing any extra credit assignments.
      Note: Extra credit assignments using this method must be out of greater than 0 points.
      3 assignment groups weighted at 60%, 40% and 3%
      Figure 1: Three weighted assignment groups totaling 103%

Note: For both methods, assigning a 0 to an extra credit assignment for students who do not earn the extra credit will result in an unchanged grade for the students.

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Article ID: 1440
Created
Tue 5/20/25 3:58 PM
Modified
Wed 5/21/25 1:16 PM

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