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Exporting Course Data

Pawtograder has no single “export this course” button. Instead, individual pages offer their own download, and each one is generated in your browser and saved to your downloads folder. No export emails anything to anyone — the only staff surface that sends mail is Course Settings → Emailer, which is a composer, not an export. The button labels are not consistent between pages. Depending on where you are, the same action is called Export to CSV, Export CSV, Export as CSV, Export All to CSV, Export Grades, Download Gradebook, or Download All Submissions. Each section below gives the label as it actually reads.

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Every export at a glance

Graders cannot reach the gradebook export. The Download Gradebook control is instructor-only, and graders have no Gradebook navigation entry at all. The assignment grades export, the submissions ZIP, the security audit export, and the submission metadata export are also instructor-only.

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Enrollment roster

Course Settings → Enrollments → Export to CSV. Columns, in order:
This export ignores the filters you have applied to the table. Whatever the table is showing, the file contains the entire roster, including dropped students and pending invitations. Filter the resulting file in your spreadsheet instead.

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Lab roster

Course Settings → Lab Sections → select a lab section → Export to CSV. Exports the active students assigned to the one section you have selected — there is no all-sections export, and dropped students and staff are excluded. The button is disabled when the selected section has no students. Base columns are Lab Section, Name, Email, GitHub Username, with missing values written as N/A. After those come three columns for each lab assignment currently shown in the table:
  • <title> - NumSubmissions
  • <title> - Score
  • <title> - Review Graded (Yes, No, or empty)
The table shows only the two most recently released lab assignments until you expand it, and unreleased labs never appear. Expand the table first if you want every released lab in the file.

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Gradebook

Gradebook → Download Gradebook → Download CSV. Instructor only. One row per student, one column per gradebook column. Identity columns come first: Name, Email, SID, Course Section, Lab Section, Tags. The export always covers every student on the roster and always skips dropped students; table filters and column visibility do not affect it. The popover has one checkbox, Use render expressions in CSV (off by default). When it is on, any column with a render expression exports the rendered string instead of the raw score — it substitutes the value rather than adding a second column. Either way you get exactly one value per column.
Tags are space-separated here, but semicolon-separated in the enrollments export. The gradebook file also starts with a UTF-8 byte order mark so Excel opens it as UTF-8.

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Survey responses

Surveys → open a survey → its responses view → Export to CSV. Headers are exactly Student Name, Submitted At, then one column per survey question, using the question titles. There is no email, SIS ID, or status column. Submitted At is formatted in the course time zone as MMM d, yyyy, h:mm a, or — for a response that was never submitted. Unlike the enrollments export, this one does honor the filters on the page: it writes the filtered set of responses, and the button is disabled when the filters match nothing.

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Discussion engagement

Course Settings → Discussion Engagement → Export CSV. Requires the Discussion feature flag. Headers are exactly Name, Karma, Posts, Replies, Likes Received, Likes Given, Total Activity. Total Activity is derived as posts plus replies. There is no thread-watch metric.

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Assignment groups and group membership

Manage Assignments → an assignment → Manage Groups. This page has two separate Export as CSV buttons. The button above the Groups table writes assignment_groups_<date>.csv: Rows are sorted by group name, and ungrouped students are appended at the end as one (Ungrouped) row each, sorted by student name.
MentorName is resolved against the course’s graders and instructors. A group whose mentor is not one of them exports an empty cell, the same as a group with no mentor at all.
The button above the Students table writes students_export_<date>.csv with Student (as Name <email>), Group (the group name or no group), and Status — one of OK, Not in a group, Group too small (min: N), or Group too large (max: N).

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Assignment grades

Manage Assignments → an assignment → Export Grades. Instructor only. The popover offers CSV and JSON of the same data, with five include checkboxes:
  • Include Score Breakdown — adds the autograder score and the score tweak
  • Include Rubric Checks — adds one column (CSV) or a nested list (JSON) per rubric check
  • Include Autograder Test Results — adds one column per test, or nested test objects in JSON
  • Include Repo Metadata — GitHub username, commit link, and SHA
  • Include Submission Metadata — submission ID, submission date, grader, and checker
With everything unchecked you get student_name, canvas_user_id, student_email, group_name, and total_score (the graded total with the tweak already applied). One row per student’s active submission.
The group_name column comes through empty in both the CSV and the JSON. Use the Manage Groups export if you need group membership. This is a known issue with an open report against Pawtograder, and a fix is on the way.

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Bulk submission download

Manage Assignments → an assignment → Download All Submissions. Instructor only. Builds assignment_<assignment_id>_submissions.zip in your browser, with one folder per student named <name>_<profile-id-prefix>. Students with no active submission get a folder containing NO_ACTIVE_SUBMISSION.txt; a submission with no recorded files gets NO_FILES.txt. For group assignments the same files are written into each member’s folder. Building the ZIP can take a while for a large class — the button reads Preparing ZIP… while it works.

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Rubric report

Manage Assignments → an assignment → expand Rubric breakdown → Export CSV. Exports how often each rubric check was applied across the cohort currently selected by the filters, in the shape of whichever view is active. The view name is part of the filename: bars, options, table, or section. The button is disabled when the cohort is empty.

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Grading and self-review assignments

Manage Assignments → an assignment → Grading Assignments → Export CSV. Columns: Assignee, Assignee Email, Submission (Student/Group), Student Names, Student Email(s), Rubric, Due Date, Status, Rubric Part, Extensions. The filename depends on which table you exported from: grading-review-assignments-<assignment_id>.csv or self-review-assignments-<assignment_id>.csv.

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Security audit

Manage Assignments → an assignment → Security Audit → Export All to CSV. Instructor only, and only after a code search has returned hits. One row per match, with Student Name, Student Email, Class Section, Lab Section, Submission ID, Submission #, Score (as score/max, or Not graded), File Name, Line Number, GitHub Link, Matched Content, and Search Term.

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TA time tracking

Office Hours → Settings → Time Tracking → Export to CSV. Columns: TA, Student, Date, Help Request ID, Duration, Queue Depth, Wait Context, Notes, Started At, Ended At. A session still in progress exports Active as its Ended At. This export honors the table’s filters but not its pagination, so you get every filtered row rather than the current page.

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Flashcard analytics

Course Settings → Flashcard Decks → a deck → its student analytics page. There are two Export CSV buttons, one above each table: per-student totals (student_deck_analytics_<deck_id>.csv) and per-card statistics (student_card_analytics_<deck_id>.csv). Both write exactly the columns of the table they sit above.

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Repository analytics

Open a submission and go to its repository analytics view, then Export CSV. Exports the commit, pull request, and issue activity listed on the page, and is disabled when there is nothing to export.

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Submission metadata

On a submission page, instructors get an icon button labelled Export All Metadata (tooltip: “Export all submission history, grader results, and diffs to markdown”). It writes a Markdown file, not a CSV, covering the full submission history, grader results, and diffs for that student or group.

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Copying student emails

Not a file download, but often what people want: on Test Insights → Common Errors, expanding an error group and clicking Show Student Emails lists the affected students’ emails with a Copy All button that puts them on your clipboard as a comma-separated list.

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Imports

Two pages accept a CSV back:
  • Course Settings → Enrollments → Import from CSV — bulk-invites or reactivates students from a roster file.
  • Gradebook → Import Columns — creates or updates gradebook columns from a CSV of scores.

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Spreadsheet gotchas

Not every export is hardened the same way, which matters if you open these files in Excel or Google Sheets.
Seven exports neutralize cells that a spreadsheet would read as a formula, by prefixing them with an apostrophe: the gradebook, both assignment-groups exports, survey responses, discussion engagement, the grading and self-review assignments export, and repository analytics. The others — including the enrollments roster, the lab roster, assignment grades, the rubric report, the security audit, the flashcard analytics exports, and the TA time tracking export — do not. A student name, tag, or matched line that starts with =, +, -, or @ can be evaluated as a formula when you open those files.
Only the gradebook, the two assignment-groups exports, and repository analytics start with a UTF-8 byte order mark, which is what makes Excel read accented characters and emoji correctly on a double-click. For everything else, if names or comments come out garbled, use your spreadsheet’s import flow and choose UTF-8 encoding instead of opening the file directly.