Every assignment in Canvas must have a number of points specified, regardless of how you would like to display grades or assessment to students. If your plan is to use points this is pretty straight forward, just enter the amount of points you would like the assignment to be worth. However, if you would like to not use points there is no option to completely get rid of them. The best way is perhaps to set points to 0 and explain to students (in the description) that the points don't matter in this case. You are not able to leave the points field blank.

Show grade as...

Canvas is forcing the use of points for each assignment - there is no way to completely disable this. But you can display grades in a couple of ways. Let's say you have created an assignment worth 25 points and a student scores 15. The different options for "Display grade as" will render the following results. There is also always the choice to set the assignment to "Not graded".

Table of grading options and how grading is displayed to teachers and students.
Display grade as	Example: Teacher view	Example: Student view
Percentage	60%	60%
Complete / Incomplete	or	or
Points	15	15
Letter grade Grading scheme: U-G	G	15 (G)
GPA scale Grading scheme: U-G	G	15 (G)

If you would like to get as far away from points as possible in Canvas you can assign 0 points to the assignment (but the value cannot be blank). However, the student will still see the actual points awarded. Like this:

Table of grading options without points and how they are displayed to teachers and students.
Display grade as	Example: Teacher view	Example: Student view
Letter grade Grading scheme: U-G	G	0 (G)
GPA scale Grading scheme: U-G	G	0 (G)

"I want to grade with points or percentage"

No trouble at all, Canvas handles this perfectly fine!

"I want to grade with complete/incomplete"

Works fine, but consider assigning at least 1 point to your assignment. If you for some reason would like to export your grades (e.g. work in Excel) only the students point scores will be exported - not the actual complete/incomplete status. Since Complete is translated to max points and Incomplete to 0 points there is no way for the exported file to distinguish between the grades if the max points are set to 0.

If your assignment should be graded with G or U and results should be reported to Ladok it is better to use the option Letter grade since a direct match, then can be made between Canvas and Ladok grading scale.

"I want to grade with letter grades + use points"

Assign your points, choose Letter Grade or GPA scale and pick a grading scheme or setup your own. Mind the percentages since a students score will be used to generate a letter grade, and if you assign a letter grade directly to a student the points awarded will be the amount that corresponds to the max point for that grade (with decimals displayed, if needed). Exporting with the Letter grade option will only export the score, not the actual letter. GPA scale however exports into the letter grade that matches the students score in the grading scheme.

Warning!

Take note when awarding 3, 4 or 5 points while also using the grading scheme 5-4-3-U for an assignment. Canvas interprets input as a grade.

"I want to grade with letter grades and not use points at all"

You can't. You can assign 0 points to your assignment, which probably is the closest you can get to not use points. But this will impact the automatically calculated total score for your course as well as the possibility to export grades (e.g. work with Excel). Grading and giving feedback will still work fine in Canvas, just choose to display grades as Letter grades or GPA scale (no difference is this context), pick your grading scheme or setup your own. The percentages in the scheme won't matter since the max points is 0 anyway. Exporting a Gradebook with assignments worth 0 points will render useless information, since what is actually is exported are the scores that generated said grade, not the actual letter grades. So in this case there will only be 0 for each student.

Using 0 as max points will also mean that features like filtering students with a certain result as recipients of a message or changing the grading scheme after grading (if a wrong one was selected) cannot be used without losing data.

Grading schemes

Grading scheme is just another word for grading scale. At JU we use four different scales:

UG (U, G)
UV (U, G, VG)
EC (F, Fx, E, D, C, B, A)
TS (U, 3, 4, 5)

These have been set up by the Canvas administrator with the addition of Revision required/Komplettering to UG, UV and TS. However, since Canvas is points based every grade in each scale is associated with a percentage (as you can see below, these are also visible when selecting a grading scheme for an assignment). If you are using points and the percentages doesn't suit your needs you can always set up your own scheme.

Grading scale U-G
Grade	Range (%)
G	100	50
Revision required / Komplettering	< 50	25
U	< 25	0

Grading scale U-VG
Grade	Range (%)
VG	100	75
G	< 75	50
Revision required / Komplettering	< 50	25
U	< 25	0

Grading scale F-A
Grade	Range (%)
A	100	90
B	< 90	80
C	< 80	70
D	< 70	65
E	< 65	60
Fx	< 60	50
F	< 50	0

Grading scale U-5
Grade	Range (%)
5	100	90
4	< 90	70
3	< 70	50
Revision required / Komplettering	< 50	25
U	< 25	0

Just below the drop down-menu for Display grade as you have the option to not count this assignment towards the final grade. What this does is ignoring this assignment (its points) when summarizing a total course percentage.

Warning!

With this setting turned on, in the assignment description the student will get a message "This assignment will not count towards your final grade" so it is not recommended to use for mandatory assignments.