Moodle 2.2 Gradebook Guide
March 2012
Basics
Where is it?
When you are in a standard OC Moodle course, look on the right hand side for Settings / Course Administration / Grades.
What does it do?
At the most basic level, Moodle Grades will keep track of your student’s grades. Any time an assignment or quiz is graded, the Moodle grade book is automatically updated. If you had an assignment that needed to be graded outside of Moodle, you can manually enter scores. Students will be able to access their grades throughout the course.
What do I do first?
Because you will be likely adding assignments as you build your course it’s a good idea to set up some categories. Even if you only have one grade item in a category, it still makes things nice and organized. To add a category, click on “simple view” from the pull down menu. From there, look down at the bottom and click “add category”
Next, give it a name and an aggregation. An aggregation is just another name for how you would like Moodle to total the grades. There are two options andboth will be described in a later section: Sum of Grades and Weighted Mean of Grades. The most basic and easiest is “Sum of Grades”. Note – it is advised to keep it to category level. Do not use sub categories as it does not compute properly.
Now That You Have Your Categories Set Up
The next step is to add a grade item such as an assignment or a quiz. You can create one right within Moodle and assign the appropriate category or you can add a grade item from the same place where you added a category (under simple view). In our case, we would have to input the presentation grade manually so we will add a grade item.
Give the grade item a name and a maximum grade value. Note – the minimum grade will always be 0. Makes sense right?
Now, when we go to the grader report we see that there is a column with the Presentation grade item in the presentation category:
Review of Aggregation Methods
You aggregate the parent category (IE the course) and the individual categories (presentations, for example). We will keep it simple and describe what each aggregation is and what it looks like set up in Moodle grade book.
Sum of Grades
What is it? It is a method which adds up all the points earned and divides it by the total possible points.
Example: A test is worth 200 points and two quizzes are 50 points each. There are 300 possible points. The student’s scores are added together for the final grade. If she received a 150 on their test and 50 points on both quizzes then she would finish with 250 points. Her final grade will be 83% (250 out of 300).
How does it look in Simple View?
Weighted Mean of Grades
What is it? It is a method which assigns weights to each category and gives each category a total based on the assigned weight of the category.
Example: If the presentation is worth 10% of the total grade and the student received 9 out of 10 then his score for that category would be 9. If the quiz category was given a weight of 20% and the student received 40 out of a total of 50 points for that category (80%) then his score for the quiz category would be .80 * 20 = 16.
How does it look in simple view?
Note – the weight must add up to 100.
What is this business about Extra Credit?
Sometimes in a class you might want to offer an assignment for extra credit. You can do this in Moodle – but you have to use the Sum of Grades aggregation method. Extra credit points are added without adding corresponding points to the course grade total.
* Remember to save changes when working in Simple View *
Can I input grades manually?
Yes – go to Grader Report, turn editing on. To make things even easier, go to “My Preferences” in the pull down menu and make sure Quick Grading & “Show quick feedback” is enabled.
Can I hide the gradebook from students?
Yes – it is a setting in course administration / edit settings
Can I export grades?
Yes – under settings / grade admin on the right hand side, select Export.
Can I import grades?
Yes – under settings / grade admin on the right hand side, select Import
Can I hide a grade column?
Yes - Turning on editing then clicking the "Show show/hide icons" link will give you the familiar show/hide eye icon next to each grade and at the top of each column. If you do not see the “show/hide” icon check in gradebook “my preferences”
Use “Aggregate only non empty grades” until near the end of the semester (under full view). This means the student won’t get a shock early on in the semester.