This so much!

I have different assignments for students with different backgrounds (engineers, electricians and non-engineers/non-electricians) and I do not know their backgrounds before the course starts, so I cannot micromanage assignment permissions beforehand. And with hundreds of students doing hundreds of these assignments, it's really inconvenient to do through permissions (the permissions menu is pretty bad in my opinion).

Now students reply to the exempted assignments that "I don't need to do this" to get rid of the message about assignments they don't actually need to do, and then I must give a grade or Its will alert me for the duration of the whole course that I have assignments to check.

All assignments should be in the gradebook anyways as the teacher has originally planned, they just should not be calculated to the course grade when exempted.

Hi Michele, and a happy new year :-)

I understand the point you’re making, and it makes perfect sense if a teacher wants to create assignments from the Gradebook. By ticking off “Exempt” they probably want the student not to hand in the assignment and hence not have the assessment in in the Gradebook. However, most teachers using itslearning create assignments outside the Gradebook. And it’s from this perspective we’ve designed the workflow; not all assignments have to be in the Gradebook. Students should still do them, but it’s up to the teachers if the assignment should go into the Gradebook. If a teacher wants particular students not to receive an assignment they can set permissions on the assignment (not as easy as ticking off “Exempt” in the Gradebook, but that’s the way it works today).

I’ll feed your idea into the work we’re doing to easy the workflow in itslearning, and in the meantime it would be interesting to get more comments from other users of the ideas portal :-)