Grades min max

Summary

When grading in Moodle, either in an activity or directly in the gradebook, you assign the student a score from a specified range. The new setting "Min and max grades used in calculation" controls how the grade will be displayed if the maximum or minimum grades are changed after students have been graded.

The 2 options are:

1) "Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings" - The students grade will be displayed out of the new range, and this will affect their percentage.

2) "Initial min and max grades" - The students grades are displayed with the range that was defined at the time the student was graded.

Example:

1. An assignment is created with maximum grade of "10"
2. Sally Student receives a score of "5 out of 10 (50 %)"
3. The assignment maximum grade is changed to "20"

If "Min and max grades used in calculation" is set to "Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings", Sally Student will have a score of "5 out of 20 (25 %)".

If "Min and max grades used in calculation" is set to "Initial min and max grades", Sally Student will have a score of "5 out of 10 (50 %)" until a teacher manually regraded Sally Student out of 20.

Information for sites upgrading from earlier versions of Moodle

The default behaviour is "Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings".

In Moodle 2.8.0 - 2.8.6 and 2.9.0 the behaviour was unintentionally changed to "Initial min and max grades".

In Moodle 2.8.7 and Moodle 2.9.1 it was restored to "Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings" and this setting was added to allow changing the behaviour. Some courses affected by the upgrade will display notices to alert them to the new setting.

How to find all courses that are affected

   SELECT * FROM mdl_config WHERE name LIKE 'show_min_max_grades_changed_%' ORDER BY name

That will return rows containing things like "show_min_max_grades_changed_211". That means that course 211 is affected. So, the URL to get to the gradebook for that course is .../grade/index.php?id=211 within your Moodle site. With a bit of clever search-and-replace, you can probably turn the output from the gradebook query into a set of URLs. For example the following is a more sophisicated version of this query that works well with the Ad-hoc database queries plugin.

   SELECT substr(cfg.name, 29) AS Course_id,
       course.shortname AS Course_shortname,
       CONCAT('%%WWWROOT%%', '/grade/report/grader/index.php', CHR(63), 'id=', substr(cfg.name, 29)) AS Grader_report_url
   
   FROM {config} cfg
   JOIN {course} course ON course.id = CAST(substr(name, 29) AS INT)
   
   WHERE name LIKE 'show_min_max_grades_changed_%'
   
   ORDER BY course.shortname

Which uses will see this warning message and button in the gradebook?

Only users with the moodle/grade:manage capability. The same one you need to edit categories and items in the gradebook. By default that is (editing) Teacher, Manager and Admin.

How can I see what grades will change before I click this button?

The only real way to do this is to have a copy of your live site where you can test. (Some places always do this as part of the testing the do before upgrading Moodle.)

In that test copy you can use the report above to find all the gradebooks that are affected. Then, by using the Grade history report, you can see which grades change when you click the button, and confirm you are happy with this before doing this on your live site.

See also

• MDL-48618 Unexpected changes on grades after upgrade to Moodle 2.8