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Tracking student progress with Canvas Outcomes allows you to monitor their mastery of specific skills or concepts. When setting up your Outcomes, you’ll need to choose a calculation method—Decaying Average or Weighted Average. Each one impacts how student performance is measured and displayed.
What Is a Decaying Average?
A decaying average gives more weight to the most recent attempt, which helps reflect a student’s current skill level. It’s especially useful for courses where students are expected to improve over time.
How It Works:
Canvas uses a default 65/35 split, meaning:
- 65% of the outcome score comes from the most recent attempt.
- 35% comes from the average of all previous attempts.
Best for:
- Skills that improve with practice: e.g., writing, presentations, or problem-solving.
- Formative assessments: Frequent, low-stakes practice where growth is expected.
- Reducing the impact of early struggles: If students improve over time, earlier low scores have less influence.
Not ideal for:
- Single-attempt or summative assessments: With few attempts, the decaying effect doesn’t apply as effectively.
- Consistent performance expectations: If each attempt should hold equal weight, this method may not be appropriate.
What Is a Weighted Average?
A weighted average allows you to assign specific percentages to individual assessments or groups of assessments. This ensures that certain assignments have a larger influence on the final outcome score.
How It Works:
You define the percentage weight for each assessment. For example:
- Midterm exam = 40% of the outcome score
- Final project = 60% of the outcome score
Best for:
- Summative assessments: When final performance carries more importance (e.g., capstone projects, final exams).
- Courses with distinct grading weights: When you want to emphasize certain assessments over others.
- Consistent scoring expectations: Each attempt contributes based on its pre-defined weight, regardless of when it occurs.
Not ideal for:
- Formative skill tracking: It doesn’t highlight growth over time.
- Frequent low-stakes assessments: Early poor performance may unfairly lower the overall outcome score.
Which One Should You Use?
- Use Decaying Average → When you want to highlight growth and reward recent improvement.
- Use Weighted Average → When you want specific assessments to carry more influence or maintain consistent value distribution.
Recommendations
If your goal is to track progress over time—which is common in outcomes-based courses—the Decaying Average is often the better option. It reflects the most recent demonstration of mastery, which is especially helpful in courses where students improve with practice.
However, if you’re grading based on major assessments (like midterms or finals) and want those to carry more weight, the Weighted Average makes more sense.
