It is recommended that the grade book is set up before the first day of class. Grades can be a source of anxiety for both students and instructors. Setting the grade book in advance helps to alleviate confusion and offer clarity for your grading policies.

1. Choose your Posting Policy: Automatically Post or Manually Post Grade Posting Policy and mute/unmute assignments

2. Late Policy: Do you have a late Policy? If it is a global policy, set this in advance knowing you can change it per student via the assignment column and grading tray. Late Policy

3. Missing Policy: Automatically set missing submissions to receive a zero. Applying Zero for missing submissions

4. To Weight or Not to Weight Your Grades: How to weight grades

Clean up the Assignment Page

Clean up the assignment groups because students do view assignment groups on their grade page. You can create assignment groups for points or weighted grades. Creating assignment groups allows students to track how they doing in each area of your course. How to create assignment groups

Go to the assignment tab
Delete empty assignment groups
Unpublish any assignments you will not be using
Consider removing old, unpublished assignments

Imported Assignments

When you import assignments from one course to another, Canvas gives assignments, not in already in assignment groups, a group entitle Imported assignments. Students will see this assignment group and this may cause confusion.

Student View of their grades page:

How to clean up Imported Assignments

Move the assignments to an appropriate group and delete the empty imported assignment group
Change the name of the imported assignment group