A marker spends twenty minutes writing three paragraphs about your essay. You spend four seconds looking at the number. This is usually described as a student problem. It is mostly a delivery problem, and it is visible in Canvas’s own settings.
The grade is immediate. The comment is daily.
Canvas treats these as two separate notifications with two separate schedules. Read straight off a real enrolled student account through the API, the email defaults are:
| Notification | |
|---|---|
| submission_graded | immediately |
| submission_grade_changed | immediately |
| submission_comment | daily |
So the number reaches you the moment it is entered, and the explanation of the number arrives in a digest, some time later, possibly the following day. By then you have already had the emotional event — good mark, bad mark — and filed the assignment as finished. The comment lands on a piece of work you have stopped thinking about.
And it is behind a click you have no reason to make
Inside Canvas the comment is not on the assignment page. It is on the submission details page, behind a speech-bubble icon, on a screen most students open once — to check that the upload worked — and never return to. Nothing about the assignment page indicates that words exist somewhere underneath it.
The result is predictable. Feedback that was written to change the next attempt gets read, if at all, after the next attempt has been submitted.
What actually helps
Change the frequency. In Canvas, go to Account — Notifications and set “Submission Comment” to notify immediately rather than daily. It is a two-click fix and it puts the reasoning back next to the judgement. Push notifications on the Canvas mobile app already default to immediate, if you have it installed.
Read it before the next one, not after this one. The useful moment for feedback on essay two is while you are outlining essay three. Feedback is about the next piece of work; the piece it is attached to is already finished.
Reply to it. A comment thread on a submission is the lowest-friction way to ask an instructor a question: they are already in that screen, the context is attached, and it needs no email etiquette. “Thank you — for the next one, would it be stronger to do X or Y?” is a question most markers will answer, and it is the shortest route from a bad mark to a better one.
Related
Canvas’s notification settings cause more than this one problem — why Canvas notifications do not stop you missing work covers the rest. And if the mark itself looks wrong, what to do when your Canvas grade is wrong is the one to read before you email anyone.