Talk:Grades

The following content has been moved here from Grades. --Helen Foster 18:38, 29 November 2011 (WST)

Settings > Course administration > Grades This link allows the teacher to see and download all scored activities in a course. It can also be revealed to students to see their own scores in the Gradebook..

For administrators:

Introduction

The Grades link is sometimes referred to Gradebook. The two central ideas of grading are:

Grades are scores given to students(or other Roles) in a Moodle course
The Grades link (or gradebook) in the Course administration menu shows the scores given by each activity. Modules push their scores to grades, but the gradebook doesn't push anything back to the modules.

The three building blocks of Grade link:

The grade category

A grade category groups grade items together, and has settings for affecting these grade items

The grade item

A grade item stores a grade for each course participant, and has settings for affecting these grades

The grade -Student scores in a course

A grade has settings for affecting how it is displayed to the users, as well as locking and hiding functions.

As an overview: Grades can be calculated, aggregated and displayed in a variety of ways, the many settings having been designed to suit the needs of a great variety of organisations.

Many activities in Moodle, such as assignments, forums and quizzes may be given grades. Grades may have numerical values, or words/phrases from a scale or rating system.

Grades can also be used as outcomes and as arbitrary text attributed to each participant in a course.

How Grades Get Into the Gradebook

Grades pushed by modules

When activity modules produce grades, they use the gradebook public API to push (or send) their grades to the gradebook. These grades are then stored in database tables that are independent of the modules. The grades are still kept in the module database tables, and the gradebook will never access or modify these original grades.

The gradebook, however, provides administrators and teachers with tools for changing the ways in which grades are calculated, aggregated and displayed, as well as means to change the grades manually (a manual edit of a grade automatically locks the grade in the gradebook, so that the module which originally created the grade can no longer update that grade in the gradebook until the grade is unlocked).

Grades Manually Added by Teachers

Users with Teacher permissions for the course can add "manual" grade items to the gradebook through the Categories and Items section.

Settings affecting grades

Being the smallest unit in the gradebook, the grade is affected by many settings at different levels. Here is a list of these levels, in hierarchical order:

Outcomes

Outcomes are specific descriptions of what a student is expected to be able to do or understand at the completion of an activity or course. An activity might have more than one outcome, and each may have a grade against it (usually on a scale).

Gradebook reports

The gradebook includes a variety of reports. Select the Grades link in each course administration block. The default report is the grader report and other reports are available by using the "Choose an action.." pulldown menu under View to find:

Grader report - The main teacher view of a course gradebook.
Outcomes report
Overview report
User report

Additionally on "Choose an action" menu, teachers can find interactive category reports which can alter the way the "View" reports appear. The "My report preferences" link (on a tab in earlier versions), enables teachers to change how the grader report is displayed.

Grades organisation

Teachers may organise grades into grade categories, import and/or export grades, and make grade calculations.

Symbols to represent ranges of grades may be set as grade letters.

Administrators may control the appearance of the gradebook site-wide by adjusting settings available via the grades link in the site administration block:

Documentation