Grade category settings

Grade category settings in Settings > Site administration > Grades > Grade category settings enable administrators to choose which options appear for teachers when adding/editing a grade category in their course gradebook, and their default values. Settings are applied site-wide.

There are two check boxes next to most features on this page. The "Force" check box eliminates any options the teacher will see. For example, the teacher will only see and be able to use the "mean of all grades" as an aggregation. The "Advanced" checkbox will hide the specific feature until the "Show advanced" button is used by the teacher. This will reduce initial menu choices for teachers but allow them to see them if they wish.

Hide forced settings

The default is to show the forced settings (see below). If these are not to be used check this box to hide them. Unchecking the "Force" setting will simply restore each category's setting to its previous state, prior to the application of the forced global setting. Administrators can thus experiment with these settings without fear of losing any specific category settings.

Aggregation

Select the type of aggregation method from a pulldown menu. (See Category aggregation for a detailed explanation.) However, there are two check boxes which will effect this default, in addition to the Hide forced settings.

The "Force" checkbox only allows the selected aggregation method to apply. This results in switches and drop-down elements being disabled in all course gradebooks. For example, if the Aggregation Type setting is forced as "Mean", teachers will no longer have the option to change the aggregation type of each grade category separately, the option will not be there in the category edit form.

Available aggregation types

The default grade aggregation is Natural, meaning the sum of all grade values scaled by weight.

Available aggregation types setting

Administrators may specify here which aggregation types are available for teachers to use.

Note that reducing the number of aggregation types simply results in disabled aggregation types not appearing in the aggregation type dropdown menu. All existing grade category calculations remain the same, regardless of whether the aggregation type is later disabled by an administrator.

Aggregate only non-empty grades

Grade category settings: Exclude empty grades option.

The "Exclude empty grades" option determines how Moodle handles activities that have not been graded yet.

If this option is enabled, Moodle will ignore any grade item that has no grade when calculating the category or course total. If it is disabled, Moodle will treat empty grades as zero when calculating averages or totals, as illustrated in the following example:

Student	Activity 1	Activity 2	Activity 3	Category Total (Exclude empty grades selected)	Category Total (Exclude empty grades unselected)
Carol	80	90	Not graded	(80 + 90) / 2 = 85	(80 + 90 + 0) / 3 = 56.67

With "Exclude empty grades" enabled

Students’ averages are based only on the work they’ve completed and been graded for. This is often used to give students the benefit of the doubt until all grades are in, encouraging continuous participation without penalising them for grades that haven't been entered yet.

With "Exclude empty grades" disabled

Any ungraded work is assumed to be a zero, which might be used to show students the impact of missing work on their overall grade. This can be a motivator for students to submit all assignments.

Choosing whether to exclude empty grades depends on your grading strategy and how you want to communicate progress to your students.

Include outcomes in aggregation

The default is no.

Keep the highest

Keeps only the X number of highest grades in the report

Drop the lowest

Drops the lowest X number of grades from the report.

When using natural weighting, drop the lowest is only allowed when:

• all children of the category have equal weights
• all children of the category have equal max grade
• there are no sub categories in the category
• there are no extra credit items in the category

See also

• Grade categories - for teachers
• Video demonstrating how to use gradebook site settings and defaults
• Video showing the effects of the grade category settings