Multiple Grading Categories

Note: This article is a work in progress. Please use the page comments or an appropriate moodle.org forum for any recommendations/suggestions for improvement.

Description

This extension supports:

Creation of assignments with multiple grading categories and sub-categories
Definition of course-level and site-level ranks. Ranks are the measures for marking sub-categories
Grading a student submission using those categories and sub-categories
Provide feedback to student with those categories and sub-categories

This extension is a deliverable for "COMP30040: Third Year Project" course at University of Manchester --Giannis Potamitis

How to install

Download the required files from here
Copy cat directory inside xxx/local/ where xxx is your main Moodle directory
Copy assignment directory to xxx/mod/assignment (overwrite existing one - see later)
Copy catadmin direcotry inside xxx/blocks/
Log in as administrator to your Moodle site and follow the instructions to install the new plug-in
Setup the Categories administration block (see later)

Overwriting assignment module

I needed to add some extra code to assignment module so as it can make use of my plug-in. In case you do not wish to overwrite the existing assignment files you should manually include (eg copy) all the changes I made in my own version of those files to your own version. The assignment files that contain extra code are:

/mod/assignment/mod_form.php
/mod/assignment/lib.php
/mod/assignment/locallib.php
/mod/assignment/type/upload/assignment.class.php
/mod/assignment/type/offline/assignment.class.php
/mod/assignment/type/online/file.php
/mod/assignment/submissions.php

You can easily find my changes to those files by looking for blocks of code that have the following form: /* ------------------------ Giannis --------------------------- */ ... my extra code here ... /* ------------------------------------------------------------ */

In other words my extra code is surrounded by the above pair of comments.

Setup Categories administration block

This block provides links to important pages of this plug-in. You can setup it as follow:

Log in as administrator
Using Settings block select Front page settings → Turn editing on
Using the “Add a block” list which appears either at the left or right side of page, select Categories administration.
The Categories administration block should now appear either at the left or right side of page. Now click to the configuration icon of this block and configure the settings as here:

How to use

Defining categories and Sub-categories

In creating/modifying an assignment form you can now check “Allow Multiple Categories” box which is found in the Grade section. This will provide you with a table in which you can easily specify your categories, their weights, maximum grades and sub-categories.

You can also choose a group of ranks from the “Sub-category Ranks” list. This group of ranks will be used as a measure for your sub-categories. You can define those groups separately

Defining groups of ranks

You can define site-level and course-level groups. Site-level groups can only be created by administrators and they will be available to all the courses. In other words those groups will be available in any course. Course-level groups can be created by both the teachers of courses and administrators and they will only be available to the course they have been created for.

For site-level groups log in as administrator and from Settings block navigate to: Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → Categories → Ranks

For course-level groups log in as a teacher and then go to the view page of the course you wish to define a group of ranks. Then from Settings block navigate to: Course administration → Categories → Ranks

You can now create a new group of ranks:

or Edit an existing one:

Grading submissions using multiple categories and sub-categories

You can now grade a student's submission using your own categories and sub-categories:

Note that sub-categories are used as a guide in deciding the actual grade of the category. You can tick more than one cell per row in the sub-categories table.

Student Feedback

The student can see the feedback per category:

How to uninstall

The plug-in can be uninstalled by an administrator with the same way as the rest of the plug-ins. Using settings block, the administrator should navigate to: Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → Manage Local plugins and delete the Categories plug-in. After the deletion you should remove the xxx/local/cat and xxx/blocks/catadmin directories where xxx is you main Moodle directory to avoid plug-in re-installation.

Documentation