A quiz closes at 11:59 on Thursday. On Friday morning you open the grading page, see twenty-two names with scores, and count the class: twenty-six. Four students are missing. Except, when you go looking, one of them did start — they're sitting there "in progress" with a timer that ran out — and one has a mark you typed in yourself after an oral make-up last week.
So the real answer to "who hasn't done the quiz?" is two students, not four. Getting from four to two is the whole job, and Brightspace doesn't make it obvious. This post walks through where to look, the four kinds of student you'll find, and what to do with each.
If you're chasing assignments rather than quizzes, the process is different enough that it has its own guide: how to see who hasn't submitted an assignment in Brightspace. This one is quizzes only.
Where quiz attempts actually live
Every Brightspace quiz has a grading area, usually reached from the quiz's own menu on the Manage Quizzes page (the option is generally labelled Grade). That page is where attempts live. Depending on your Brightspace version it's organised into tabs — commonly Users, Attempts and Questions — and the Users view is the one you want for "who".
Here's the part that catches almost everyone: by default, that page shows completed attempts. It isn't a class list. A student who never opened the quiz doesn't appear as a row saying "no attempt" — they simply aren't there. And a student whose attempt is still open isn't there either, until you change the filter.
The page has a filter (in most installs it's a Restrict to dropdown, sometimes tucked behind "Show Search Options") that lets you widen the view — to all users, or to users with attempts in progress. Labels vary a little between Brightspace versions and depending on how your school has set things up, so if the wording on your screen is different, look for the dropdown that changes which students are listed.
The one-sentence version: the default grading view answers "who finished?", not "who didn't start?". To answer the second question you have to compare it against the class, or change the filter.
The four kinds of student you'll find
Once you widen the view, every student falls into one of four groups. They look similar in a list of names, but they need completely different responses.
1. No attempt at all
The student never opened the quiz, or opened the page and never clicked start. Nothing is recorded. These are the students you actually need to chase — and they're the easiest to miss, because the default view shows them by leaving them out.
2. An attempt in progress
The student started but the attempt was never submitted. This happens more than you'd think: a laptop died, the browser tab closed, Wi-Fi dropped in the library, or the timer ran out and the quiz wasn't set to submit automatically. Their answers may be saved, but there's no score yet. This is a technical problem more often than an effort problem, so treat it that way first.
3. Submitted
A completed attempt, with a score — or with written-response questions still waiting for you to mark. Done, from the student's side.
4. Graded without an attempt
There's a mark for the student in the gradebook, but no quiz attempt behind it. You put it there: an oral make-up, a paper version for a student with an accommodation, a mark carried over from another section when a student transferred in, or an exemption handled as a manual grade. These students are finished. They're also the ones most likely to be wrongly chased, because from the quiz's point of view they never took it.
Why these get mixed up
Three things in Brightspace pull these groups together:
- The quiz and the gradebook are separate tools. The grading page knows about attempts. The Grades tool knows about marks. A mark entered directly in the gradebook doesn't create an attempt, so the quiz has no record of it — and a student can look "missing" in one place and "done" in the other.
- The default filter hides two groups. No-attempt students and in-progress students both start off invisible on the grading page. If you only ever look at the default view, they blend into one undifferentiated "not there".
- Counting by subtraction loses information. "Twenty-six students, twenty-two scores, so four missing" is quick, but it can't tell you why each of the four is missing. That's the step where a student with a dead battery gets the same message as a student who ignored the quiz.
Quiz settings that change what you see
Before you contact anyone, it's worth a minute in the quiz's settings, because a few of them change what "missing" means. Brightspace's options differ a little across versions, so treat these as things to check rather than exact menu paths.
- Availability dates. If the quiz has an end date, a student who didn't start before it can't start now. If it has no end date, "missing" may just mean "not yet". Check both the start and end dates — copied courses often carry last year's.
- Special access. Individual students can be given different dates or a longer time limit. A student with extended time may legitimately not have started yet even though the quiz has closed for everyone else. Check the quiz's special access list before deciding anyone is late.
- Attempts allowed. If students get more than one attempt, a submitted attempt doesn't mean they're finished, and an in-progress attempt may be a second try rather than a stuck first one. If they get only one, a stuck in-progress attempt may block them from starting again until you deal with it.
- Time limit and what happens when it runs out. Depending on how the quiz is set, an expired timer may submit the attempt automatically or leave it sitting in progress. If you're seeing lots of in-progress attempts, this setting is the first suspect.
- Release conditions. If the quiz is only visible after a student completes something else, a student who hasn't started may not be able to see it at all.
What to do with each group
No attempt: this is your real list. A short, specific message works better than a general reminder — the quiz name, whether it can still be taken, and by when. If the quiz has closed, decide your policy before you message, not after: reopen it with special access, offer a make-up, or record it as not done.
In progress: ask before you assume. "Your attempt on the Unit 3 quiz didn't submit — did something go wrong?" gets an honest answer far more often than "you didn't finish the quiz". Brightspace generally gives you ways to deal with a stuck attempt from the grading page — your school's help pages will have the exact steps for your version — or you can give the student special access to go back in and submit.
Submitted: nothing to chase. If the quiz has written-response questions, these are the attempts waiting for your marking, which is a different list.
Graded without an attempt: leave them alone. If you keep a note of why each one was marked directly — oral, paper, transfer — you'll be glad of it at report card time and at parent-teacher interviews, when "why does the quiz say she never took it?" is a fair question.
Contacting home? For the no-attempt group, a parent message is often the step that actually gets the quiz done. Make it about the one quiz, not a pile — there's more on that in how to message parents about missing work in Brightspace.
Doing this faster with ClassWatcher
I built ClassWatcher because I was doing the subtraction above by hand, quiz after quiz. Here's what it does on quizzes, and what's free.
On the quiz's grade page, the free list shows who has no attempt. Install the Chrome extension, open a quiz's grading page, and a box on the page lists every student in your class who doesn't have an attempt — with the count, a first/last name sort, and when it last updated. No account, no card, and it doesn't expire.
Graded-without-an-attempt students are shown separately. If a student has a mark but no attempt, they don't appear in the missing list. They appear underneath, in a grey "graded without an attempt" block, so the oral make-up and the transfer student don't get chased by mistake.
▶ Check gets you to the right page. On Manage Quizzes, and on a quiz's edit page, there's a small ▶ Check link beside each quiz. It takes you straight to that quiz's grade page, where the list appears — one click instead of the menu.
The first time you open a course, ClassWatcher asks "Is this your course?" with a count of people and a choice of roles, so teachers and assistants don't end up in your student list. Nothing is saved until you say yes, and the roster stays in your browser on that computer. With no account, the on-page list sends nothing to us — opening a page, checking who hasn't started and sorting the list make no requests to our servers. The getting-started guide walks through the first visit.
When you have more than one quiz to check
The free list works one quiz at a time. If you want to check several quizzes — or quizzes and assignments together — in one pass, that's what a watch list is for. Watch lists are part of the paid plans, starting with Basic at CA$8/month, which also adds parent texting and email, contact history and CSV/Excel export. Scans run when you click, not in the background.
On the free tier those controls stay visible with a 🔒, so you can see what's there; a paid plan is what unlocks them. Questions about any of it are answered on the support page, or email [email protected].
The short version
The default quiz grading view tells you who finished. To find who hasn't started, widen the filter or compare against your class, then split the gap into four: no attempt, in progress, submitted, and graded without an attempt. Check availability dates, special access and attempts allowed before you decide anyone is late. Then chase only the first group — and ask the second what went wrong.