Grader report

The grader report page is the main teacher view of the new gradebook in Moodle 1.9.

Basics

The gradebook collects items that have been graded from the various parts of Moodle that are assessed and allows you to view and change them as well as sort them out into categories and calculate totals in various ways. When you add an assessed item in a Moodle course, the gradebook automatically creates space for the grades it will produce and also adds the grades themselves as they are generated, either by the system or by you.

The grades displayed are the raw marks from the assessments themselves, so will depend on how you set those up e.g. an essay out of 36 will appear as how ever many raw marks that student got, not a percentage.

Layout

Along the top are several rows: first the course, then the category, then the actual column (e.g. an essay or a category total). When you start off, every essay, quiz etc is in the uncategorised category.

You can add a row showing the range of possible scores by going to My report preferences and selecting Show ranges.

There are three ways that the categories can be displayed

• Grades only - without the category totals column
• Collapsed - Category total column only
• Full view - grades and the aggregates (the totals column for the category)

Each section has a small icon at the top right. Clicking this will cycle through these display modes for that category. + goes to grades only view, o goes to full view and - goes to collapsed view.

Other layout options

The defaults for these options can be set at site level by going to Administration->

• You can add a row showing the range of possible scores by going to My report preferences and selecting Show ranges.

Highlighting

When your gradebook starts to grow, it can be hard to keep track of which student and which assignment a cell refers to. Highlighting solves that.

• Clicking on empty space in the cell that contains the students name will toggle the highlighting of that entire row
• Clicking on empty space in the cell at the top of each column will toggle highlighting of the entire column

Categorising the grades

The 'View' drop down on the upper left will let you switch to other views

• Edit categories and items will allow you to set up your assessments in different categories e.g. 'classwork', 'homework' etc.

Each category will then have its own Category total column.

Altering the grades

You can click turn editing on at the top right to show an edit icon next to each grade. Clicking on the icon will bring up the editing screen for that grade which will allow you to set the grade, its written feedback and a number of other attributes.

Alternatively, you can click on My report preferences and choose Quick grading and Quick feedback to make the report appear with editable boxes containing each grade, so you can change many at once.

Calculating totals

Rather than a simple average or sum, Moodle can perform very complex calculations to produce the totals for each category and for the whole course. e.g. you want to take an average of 3 items from one category, double it, then add it to the average of another category.

You can do this using calculations. Either turn on editing, then click Show calculations, or go to My report preference, choose show calculations, then save and turn editing on. You will then see a small calculator icon next to each total column which, when you click on it, will take you to the calculation page where there are instructions.

To choose how the grades are aggregated for the totals within categories, you can turn editing on and click on the little editing icon for the category. You can then choose to have means, medians, modes etc, leave out empty grades and other settings.

See also

• BASIC Moodle Gradebook Setup and Use video