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Canvas - Known Issue - “N/A” values appearing in the exported gradebook; impedes import of edited gradebook [UW-Madison]

This document describes a known issue affecting Canvas courses, and the two known manifestations of the problem.

An issue within Canvas has been detected that presents in two different situations.

  1. Instructors may notice several "N/A" values in the exported gradebook.
  2. Instructors may notice a subset of students are appearing associated with a quiz in SpeedGrader.

"N/A" values in the gradebook

In the first example, instructors who export the gradebook may notice “N/A” values are appearing in some cells. (see image)

image of gradebook spreadsheet before import. Several cells show "N/A"

In the Canvas gradebook, those same cells appear simply as ungraded null values.

Canvas gradebook that contains ungraded values

Further, upon editing the gradebook for the purpose of importing new grades, any cell that contained an “N/A” value does not get successfully imported.

Image of spreadsheet after import, with incorrect cells highlighted.

Not all students are available in SpeedGrader

In the second example, when an instructor attempts to view a quiz in SpeedGrader, it appears only a subset of 19 students have received the quiz. (see image) In this example, there are 76 students in the class.

SpeedGrader, 19 of 76 students displayed

Affects

At present, the only constant thread we notice is that the “N/A” values only appear for assignments that do not have a due date.

Workaround

The fastest workaround for an instructor is to edit each assignment or quiz that is presenting either of these traits, and make a modification to one of the values in the "Assign" options. Specifically, success has been achieved by:

  1. adding a due date to the assignment or quiz, and
  2. altering the "Assign To" field, saving the change, then returning the field back to its original value.

Assign to options

If there are more than a few assignments that need to be fixed and you'd like help fixing them, please contact the DoIT Help Desk to collect information and escalate to the Learn@UW Team.

Also, courses can be identified and passed along to Instructure Support. They will run the course through an internal process to resolve the issue.

Status

  • This issue was recognized in UW-Madison’s instance on Tuesday, February 18.

  • The fix was recognized on Thursday, February 20.

  • This Known Issues document and a solution was socialized on Friday, February 21.

  • This Known Issues document was updated and expanded to include a second expression of the problem on Friday, March 3.

Related Information

The Known Issue from Instructure can be found here.


Keywords:
canvas gradebook null n/a import blank cells empty values grades students speedgrader 
Doc ID:
148524
Owned by:
Learn@UW Madison in Learn@UW-Madison
Created:
2025-02-21
Updated:
2025-03-07
Sites:
DoIT Help Desk, Learn@UW-Madison