At Illinois Tech, assessments and grading are essential components of the learning experience, providing students with the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and progress while giving instructors valuable insights into student performance. Through Canvas, instructors can create assignments and quizzes, add rubrics for transparent grading criteria, and manage all grading in the intuitive Gradebook. Turnitin, integrated within Canvas, ensures academic integrity by offering plagiarism detection through Similarity Reports and provides tools to detect AI-generated content. With these tools, faculty can streamline the assessment process, from creating and distributing assignments to grading and giving feedback, all within one platform.
Benefits of Creating Assessments and Grading in Canvas
- Efficient and Streamlined Process: Canvas simplifies the creation and management of assessments, allowing instructors to easily assign tasks and quizzes, set due dates, and grade submissions within the same platform.
- Improved Feedback: With rubrics and automated grading features, instructors can provide consistent, transparent, and timely feedback to students, helping them understand where they excel and where improvement is needed.
- Enhanced Student Engagement: Clear grading criteria and the use of diverse assessment types help motivate students to stay engaged and actively participate in their learning.
- Maintaining Academic Integrity: Turnitin’s plagiarism detection tools help ensure that student work is original, maintaining the high standards of academic honesty at Illinois Tech.
- Accessibility and Flexibility: The mobile-friendly Canvas platform allows students to complete assessments and view their grades from any device, ensuring flexibility and continuous access to their coursework.
Think Creatively When Creating Assessments
- Review your courses’ learning objectives; think outside the box to assess student achievement of these goals
- Consider a variety of alternatives to online exams. To address concerns about test security, online exam options could include a final project; open-book/open-notes exam; shorter, more frequent, lower stakes online exams using Canvas Quizzes; or an oral exam through Zoom within your Canvas course site — scheduled in individual 20–30-minute appointments
- Collaborative projects create a more student-centered learning environment and give students an opportunity to practice and demonstrate teamwork skills
- Conduct authentic Quizzes (i.e., assessments involving real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills) to achieve the course learning goals
Address Accessibility
Work with the Center for Disability Resources (CDR) to ensure that all accommodation requests are addressed appropriately. With or without a formal accommodations request on file, make sure that your exams are inclusive and accessible for all students by using principles of universal design for learning; one example is giving an extended time period for all students in which to complete an exam.