Guide for CityU HK TAs to upload student grades to Canvas

• Before start
• Source and preprocessing
• Merge to standard format
• Upload to publish

The guide, as the title says, is for TAs of CityU HK, which is denoted as CityU without ambiguity. CityU uses Canvas as the online learning platform which includes lab and assignment grade publishing. If you are a CityU TA, you will get grades from PASS3, which is a OJ system used by CityU, or other sources like manual processing. To publish the grades, you need to upload them to Canvas, and the guide is just to show a optimized way to make it.

If the grades are on PASS3, export them as CSV. If the grades are an Excel (MS, WPS, or LibreOffice) file, open and re-save it as CSV.

Then trim the CSV file to only keep the 2 columns: the grades and the student EIDs. The student EIDs is the one in their Emails, and also used to login AIMS, which is the student management system used by CityU. If you do not have a GUI CSV editor, you can use the Python builtin csv package to make it.

Rename the grade columns as the lab or assignment name, e.g., Lab1 for the lab 1, or Assignment1 for the assignment 1. if you want to merge the grades with other ones already on Canvas, you need to name it as the assignment ID, which can also be found on Canvas. And rename the EID column as SIS Login ID. For detailed information, check the grade importing guide of Canvas.

Export a grade summary from Canvas as a template, which contains Student, ID, SIS User ID, SIS Login ID, Section, and some other columns. Only leave 5 columns above and remove other ones. You can always use the template later and there is no need to export it again, since we only need the student metadata other than latest grades.

Install csvkit, which is a Python package, for csvjoin command. Join the template and grades on the SIS Login ID column as:

csvjoin -c 'SIS Login ID' template.csv grades.csv > result.csv

Now there is the tricky part. While Canvas can import CSV grades to itself, which is what the guide is about to do, it requires not only several columns but keeping the columns in a particular order (Which is wired IMO. Seems they make a CSV parser by themselves and without thorough thinking.). You need to modify it to keep the columns in the order: Student, ID, SIS User ID, SIS Login ID, Section, and finally the grades.

Finally, import the result CSV file in the Grades tab of Canvas. If you need to change the assignment type, later change it in the Assignments Tab.