Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Community Participant

Is there a way to view which assignments rubrics are assigned to?

Is there a way to see which assignments rubrics have been attached to? I understand that going to an assignment, I can see the rubric attached. I'm wondering if the reverse is possible. I'd like to go to Outcomes to view all the rubrics, select a rubric, and see which assignments it has been used in. 

As an instructional designer, I work on a hundred courses, not all of which were built by me, and it would help greatly to know which assignments to edit when the SME sends in an updated rubric. 

Thank you!

7 Replies
Community Participant

Hi  @sharongansy !

As far as I know that is not currently can do something similar to that looking at Outcomes (How do I view all aligned items and artifacts within an outcome?‌) which if you use outcomes on your rubrics that could do it. I don't think that is what you are looking for though.

This would be a useful feature to have. Maybe consider submitting it as an idea?

I'll vote for it!


Community Participant

Hi Julie,

Thank you! Something similar to the Outcomes feature, but for assignments and rubrics would be immensely helpful. I created a feature idea as you suggested. Thank you!


Community Participant

I voted for it!

Community Participant

Thank you very much! Please share the feature idea with others who might find it useful in their work processes too.

Community Champion


This information is not available through the web, but it is obtainable through the API. You would have to load the assignments for each course and then compare the information in rubric_settings to match the rubric.

I've seen people ask about this before and it seems like something that would be really useful for instructional designers.

Community Participant

We will check out the API option, thank you! A web feature would offer not only time savings for instructional designers, but also for faculty who build and manage their own courses, instructors who are assigned duplicated sections to teach and given access to change rubrics,  as well as program administrators who would like to do rubric standardization or reviews across courses. 

Community Champion

Now that I had a little time to process, I want to add some additional notes.

I suggested looking at assignments because it returns the rubric if it's associated. But there is also Rubrics API that will tell you all of the rubrics that are available within a course.

That's not as useful as it sounds.

To get the list of rubrics for a course, you need to use the Rubrics API. The List rubrics endpoint will give you a list of all of the course-level rubrics used in a course. It does not include the actual rubric, just the information about the rubric.

You can then iterate through those and use the Get a single rubric endpoint with include=assessments to get a list of which assessments used that single rubric.


That still doesn't include the rubric itself, just how it was used.

When I say assessment, I don't mean assignment. When I request the information, I get submissions that were graded with that rubric. Here's an example. The rubric ID is 1518463. The first assessment has an artifact_type of "Submission" and an artifact_id of 248118955. That means that the submission with ID 248118955 used this rubric. I would have to lookup the submission using the submissions API to figure out what assignment went with that.

Unfortunately, you can't look up look up submissions using the submission ID. You have to look it up by the assignment ID and iterate through them to find the submission ID (unless you also happen to know the user ID). But finding the assignment ID was the entire point.

Don't give up hope yet.

If you add style=full to the parameters, you'll also get the criteria, which is essentially the content of the rubric, and you'll also get the rubric entries (what item was chosen) for each assessment that used it in the data property. The biggest help, though, is the rubric_association.


Here the rubric_association tells you that the association_type is assignment and the association_id is 21484607. Since the association_type is assignment, that means that the assignment ID is 21484607. Furthermore, the name of that assignment is "Discussion Analysis Group Reasoning".

You still don't have the user ID in there, so the submission ID is worthless unless you iterate through all submissions looking for it.

All that is with a course-level rubric. If you have an account level rubric, I can't answer what you'll see. The only account level rubric doesn't return any additional information when I ask it to include=assessments. I don't know if that's because no one has used it or if it just doesn't return information.

There is another issue to consider. Every time a rubric is changed or copied, it changes rubric IDs. That means that you can't just look for an ID, but you'll need to have some way to compare text within the rubric. I remember doing some work with this once. I took the descriptions and choices within a rubric, concatenated them all together into a single value, possibly creating a hash of that to make it smaller, and then looked for re-used rubrics that way. I think I was trying to track down who had started with an account level rubric and modified it so it was now a course level rubric.

What I probably would do, realizing this may change if I researched it more, would be to download all the assignments for all of the courses and extract the rubric criterion and store it in a local database. Then I would create some kind of way to search that database -- either for words within a rubric or by rubric ID and use it.  Trying to do a live query against the API from within the browser is going to be too time consuming in large classes (large amounts of students when using the Rubrics API or large number of assignments when using the Assignments API).

From Canvas perspective, adding a list of all the places a particular rubric is used within a course would be possible, but it would miss so many places that the user expected it to show up that it might not be useful. And it would miss those places where copies were made of a Rubric since Canvas doesn't track a "source" when the rubric is copied.