Comment by e28eta
9 hours ago
Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable.
9 hours ago
Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable.
Emails from Canvas saying a grade is available do not currently include the actual grade in the email, so that feature would have to be implemented first. And it's probably not implemented quite intentionally because of FERPA.
If only we had some way of signing messages
> Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received
It's better than nothing. (And good training for the real world.)
Also, most universities (and many schools now) issue academic e-mail addresses to students. In those cases, the email is definitive proof.
DKIM signature could be used to verify that Canvas' server sent the email with the given content
Good luck having people forward an email a) with headers and b) in a way that doesn't break the signature...
And who exactly do you think is going to verify 100s of thousands of emails this way dude?
A computer?
As opposed to a screenshot of a website? Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school?
> Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school?
This would undermine Canvas's lock-in.
Canvas is built to automatically export its gradebook to an external system. It will do that automatically every day if you want it to. Teachers or others can manually export to the configured foreign system on demand. So if you grade something and want it to show up in the foreign gradebook without waiting for the daily export, you can just press the button to make it happen right away.
i cannot believe how much benefit of the doubt people are giving canvas
ed tech is the WORST performing VC sector
the ONLY game in that town is vendor lock-in! are people joking?
c'mon, canvas is a huge piece of shit. the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first, rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free.
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Nope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.)
Presumably the system will be back up eventually, so there's not much benefit to lying here, since at best you'll raise your grade in a few classes for a couple months, while taking on a pretty big risk of getting caught.
You forget things can be signed, with the key owned by the school. It can be done.
Does signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective?
Exactly this, when was the last time a HN user had to interact with the prototypical 60-year-old set-in-their-ways professor?
Extremely non-tech savvy, hates computers, and is gonna grumble "What the hell is a PGP? Better not be another one of those phone code things." as you try to pitch this highly-technological solution to a largely niche problem domain.
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