Canvas grade passback is a feature for organizations with a School & District license that allows teachers to return scores from Formative assignments back to Canvas.

Formative currently offers two methods to passing grades back to Canvas - Automatic and Manual.

Automatic Grade Passback is enabled at the assignment level and applies only to formatives that incorporate auto-graded questions only (no rubrics or question types that require manual scoring by the teacher), and it will sends grades back to Canvas without any action from the teacher once all the required conditions have been met (see below).

Manual Grade Passback applies to all formatives and can be triggered by the teacher at any time once students have launched the assignment from within Canvas and started working on it.

Below you can find the specific prerequisites for each Grade Passback method along with step-by-step instructions.

Toggling on the assignment setting will send grades back from Formative into Canvas automatically, as long as all the prerequisites and conditions below are met.

There are a few initial steps to ensure the automatic passback feature is available on a formative:

Once the assignment is fully submitted (by the student or via teacher on behalf of the student) and all questions are auto-graded, scores are automatically sent back to Canvas.

Please note, that the only grades that pass back automatically are the ones fully completed at the time of the initial submission.

Any update to the grade in Formative will require a manual passback to send the updates back into Canvas, including:

As mentioned before, if any part of the assignment requires manual teacher scoring, like an open-ended question, automatic passback will not apply.

However, teachers can use Manual Grade Passback to send the grades back, as long as the prerequisites below are fully met.

Teachers can also use Manual Grade Passback if any of the students' scores need to be updated after they've already been sent to Canvas.

There are a few initial steps to ensure the passback feature is available on a formative:

After your students have started responding to questions, click on the Canvas assignment that contains a formative.

If you did not check "Load This Tool in a New Tab" when you created the Canvas assignment, you'll see the formative load directly in Canvas. If you did check "Load This Tool in a New Tab," then you'll see a button prompting you to load the formative in a new window. Click on this to load the formative.

Click on the triple dots near the top right of the formative, and select "Grade Passback". Then select "Pass back grades to Canvas:"
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You will be presented with an interface where you can choose which students' grades you wish to send to the Canvas grade book. You can select / deselect classes and students on this interface, and adjust the scores if you wish:

Enabling complete/incomplete grading is also an option when manually passing back grades! When enabled, it gives 100% to students who submitted. Teachers can also manually adjust the complete/ incomplete status prior to passing the grades back.

This can occur if the assignment the student(s) used to answer the formative was removed or changed not to use Formative. You will likely have to manually enter the grades in this case as Formative no longer has the right information it needs to pass grades to the right place in the gradebook.

If you're running into error messages when attempting to pass grades back into Canvas, please refer to Instructure's list of common error codes, and resolution steps, listed HERE.