Enhanced Rubrics, honestly

Rubrics in Canvas changed, and some of it is genuinely worse for the way a lot of people here grade. If you've felt that, you're not imagining it and you're not doing it wrong.

This page is what actually changed, what it costs you, and where you still have a choice — including the choice that has an expiry date on it.

Both halves of the timing, because only hearing one is how you get ambushed: Enhanced Rubrics is on at RJ now, and you can still turn it off in your course. Instructure's expected Canvas-wide enforcement is around 19 December 2026, at which point the off switch disappears.

So: roughly this fall semester of choice, then it's the only option. I'd rather you hear that now than build a semester around a tool that vanishes at the break. Confirm the current date with me before planning around it — Instructure has moved it before.

The One That Actually Hurts

You now have to choose: free-form comments, which restores your saved comment bank, or rating-based numeric scoring. Not both. For years you could have both.

This is a real regression, not a change you'll get used to. An Instructure support rep has confirmed the limitation in the community forum and agreed a fix would help. Nothing has been committed to.

The question underneath isn't really about rubric settings. It's: is your rubric mostly doing scoring work, or mostly doing feedback work?

If you turn on free-form comments

You get your saved comment bank back — for a feedback-heavy grader that's most of the value of a rubric in the first place.

You give up rating-based numeric scoring, and less obviously you lose the ability to attach Outcomes. If you do any Outcomes-based assessment, that door closes. Worth knowing before you flip it and discover it in November.

If you keep rating-based scoring

The numbers work the way they always have, and Outcomes stay available.

You give up comment reuse — in practice, rewriting feedback per student, or keeping a document open beside SpeedGrader to copy from. That second one works, and it is exactly as annoying as it sounds.

A third path worth considering: split it by assignment rather than by course. Rating-based on the assessments where the score is the point and feedback is brief; free-form on the two or three big writing pieces where your comments do the real teaching. More setup, but it stops you optimising a whole course around one bad tradeoff.

What we do at RJ: nothing. We haven't set a standard here and I don't think we should — a maths assessment and a junior research paper are not solving the same problem. What I'd ask is that you make the call deliberately rather than discovering it mid-grading at nine at night. And if you're doing Outcomes-based work, check that first, because it constrains everything else.

The Other Four Things You'll Hit

“My rubric is cut off — I can't read it in SpeedGrader.”	Known and documented, worst with five or more rating columns. Fewer, wider criteria read better in the new SpeedGrader than many narrow ones. There are three view modes — traditional, horizontal, vertical — and it's worth trying all three on your actual rubric before deciding it's broken.
“It won't let me edit my rubric.”	That's a rubric attached to more than one assignment. Canvas won't let you edit it until it's detached from all but one — because editing would silently change every assignment using it. Detach, edit, reattach.
“The + Rubric button disappeared.” · “My students say they can't see the rubric.”	There's a documented conflict where enabling an LTI tool on an assignment makes the + Rubric button disappear and hides an attached rubric from students in a browser. The workaround is to attach the rubric before enabling the tool. I want to be straight about the evidence here. This is documented with Turnitin. The same mechanism should apply to Copyleaks, which is what we use, but I have not confirmed it at RJ yet. If this happens to you, tell me — you'd be the test case, and I'd rather know than keep guessing.
“SpeedGrader looks different — is it faster?”	No, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The performance gains target large-enrolment college sections. At our class sizes this is a layout change, not a speed boost you'll feel. It is worth changing one thing in there though — see grading order.

If the timing on any of this is going to hurt a specific course, tell me and we'll work out what to do about it together. And if you want to build a rubric that survives these limits rather than fighting them, that's a working session with your actual rubric — faster than either of us reasoning about it in the abstract.

Jason Beyer

Educational Technology · Regis Jesuit High School · A.M.D.G.

LAST VERIFIED · AUGUST 2026

Who to ask · Teams message is fastest · HelpDesk (laptops, logins, network) helpdesk@regisjesuit.com · 303.269.8080