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Grade items

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Revision as of 13:10, 26 February 2008 by Nicolas Connault (talk | contribs)


Introduction

The three building blocks of the Gradebook in Moodle 1.9 are

  1. The grade category
  2. The grade item
  3. The grade

A grade item is a unit of measurement by which participants in a course are graded (i.e. 'marked'). As such, a grade item is a container for grades and a set of settings applied to these grades. The settings affect the calculation and display of the grades in the gradebook reports and exports.

Grade items are represented by columns in the grader report.

Grade items may refer to course activities (e.g. a quiz, an assignment etc.), Outcomes or even manual grades. Following is an overview of each type.

Activity-based grade items

Editing a grade item

Modules that include a form of grading use the Gradebook API to generate a matching grade item, and to communicate their grades to the gradebook.

Outcome grade items

Manual grade items

Editing a manual grade item

These grade items are created manually through the "Edit Categories and Items" page. The "Add grade item" button is clicked, and the form appears. Several options are available here which are normally automatically filled out by the activity module creating a regular grade item:

  1. Item name: The display name of your grade item
  2. ID Number: An arbitrary string of characters used to refer to this grade item in Formulas. If set, it must be unique.
  3. Grade type: The type of grade: None (no grading possible), Value (a numerical value), Scale (an item in a list) or Text (arbitrary text).
  4. Scale: Which scale to use for grading: available only when the Scale grade type is selected.
  5. Maximum grade: The maximum grade that can be given (for scales: the number of items in the scale - 1)
  6. Minimum grade: The minimum grade that can be given (for scales: 0)

Conversely, two of the settings found in the form for regular grade items are absent from this form:

  1. Multiplicator: Factor by which all grades for this grade item will be multiplied.
  2. Offset: Number that will be added to every grade for this grade item, after the Multiplicator is applied. (can be a negative number)

Common settings

These settings are common to both the manual grade item form and the regular grade item form:

  1. Item info: General information about the grade item. Optional.
  2. Grade to pass: The grade value needed to pass this grade item.
  3. Grade display type: See the Grade display type doc
  4. Grade decimal points: The number of decimal points to display in reports
  5. Hidden: Whether this grade item should be hidden from students
  6. Hidden until: An optional date after which the grade item will no longer be hidden (i.e. a grades release date)
  7. Locked: Whether or not to lock this grade item. A locked grade item doesn't accept changes to its settings or grades from its related module.
  8. Locked after: A date after which the locking will be effective, usually after the grades release date.

See also