IssueTracker

Created internal b/187067243 to track it

Entity Extraction released a new beta2 SDK which doesn't depend on okhttp-urlconnection anymore.

https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/release-notes#june_29_2021

To revive it, I had ChatGPT look at this important issue, and effectively stumped it. Specifically, I gave it quite a bit of output from the log consisting of paired assignment/submission objects in JSON. I manually marked the EXCUSED entries and asked it to compare these to the unmarked ones to find patterns helpful for detecting excused assignments programmatically. I thought ChatGPT's (rather bleak) assessment was pretty spot on, so I'll share:

Short Answer: Unfortunately, Google Classroom’s API does not expose “Excused” in its returned data, even though Classroom’s front-end UI does let a teacher mark certain student assignments “Excused.” There is no separate field excused in the JSON you receive.

Because of that, there’s no sure-fire pattern in the API data alone (e.g. grade = 0 or missing) that tells you “this was marked as Excused in Classroom.” The only way to see that directly is from the teacher’s perspective in the web UI, or by manually adding your own flag in any software you build around the Classroom API.

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Why We Can’t Detect “Excused” from the Classroom API

1. Google’s Docs Omit Excused The official Classroom API docs don’t mention any field to store or return an “Excused” status. The states we can see are things like CREATED, TURNED_IN, or RETURNED, plus numeric grades or draftGrade, but “Excused” never appears as a separate field.
2. No Hints in the JSON If you look over the raw JSON for each submission, you’ll notice no consistent or even hidden property that flips from false to true for “excused.” Some submissions have no grades, others do. Some are turned in, others aren’t—none of it correlates reliably to “excused.”
3. Google’s UI vs. Under-the-Hood The Classroom GUI is effectively toggling an internal “excused” marker that Google does not share in the public API. This is similar to how some SIS features in Classroom do not appear in the standard data feed.

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Bottom Line

Right now, the official Classroom API simply does not expose the “Excused” status. Your only options are to keep tagging “excused” in your own records—or file a feature request with Google to add it to the Classroom API. But there is no built-in field or pattern in the raw submission JSON that reveals whether a teacher checked the “Excused” box in the Classroom web interface.`

My bottom line: Seems like a pretty simple solution to add a boolean attribute to the submission object called Excused.