Policy - Retroactive effects of completion settings
Summary
There is an open policy question: Should past activity completions might be retroactively affected by changes to settings? That is, after a student completes an activity and it's marked as "completed-passed", "completed-failed", etc., might it later become "incomplete"?
As one example, a student might complete a Quiz, with a passing grade. The quiz is marked as completed-passed, which opens up a Certificate. The student prints the certificate and files it with regulators. Six months later, the teacher decides that from now on the passing grade should be higher. The teacher changes the "grade to pass" setting. Should the student who completed and passed six months prior now be marked as "failed", and their certificate revoked?
Two major categories of actions were mentioned, and two types of "intentions", or use-case scenarios, with different policies appearing reasonable depending on the type of
action and use-case or intention of the user. Actions can be a) changes to what a student has done , such as submitting or deleting an assignment or b) settings/requirements adjustments by the teacher.
Settings changes may be the result of two types of intentions - a decision that the new requirements should be different from the old, or a correction to an incorrect setting.
Changes to what a student has done
Sam Marshall gave two examples suggesting that when there is a change to what a student has done, that could change the fact that something the student completed something.
Example 1: If you just use 'on grade' completion, if a student does something and gets a grade, it will be marked complete. If the teacher then deletes their grade from gradebook, it will be marked incomplete again.
Example 2: In forum, if you set it to be complete after making 3 posts, and the student makes 3 posts, it will be marked complete. But if the teacher then deletes one of the posts, it will be marked incomplete again.It could be argued that things should not be automatically 'un-completed' in this way (there are cases when both the above examples definitely seem appropriate, but it might be OK if the teacher had to manually un-complete them as well)
No reasoning was posted with an opposing view on what should happen when changes are made to what a student has done.
Changes to settings
There are different opinions in regards to changes to settings, such as the grade required to pass. If a student completes an activity, such as passing a test, and some time later the "grade to pass" is changed, should their "completed-passed" be changed to "completed-failed", or should the changes apply "from now on"?
Per Ekström wrote:
I would say, no.
As a student, you're given a deal; "Get a score of X or higher and you pass." If the bar is raised, and it's applied retroactively, then you are basicly breaking your end of the bargain. A pass is a pass no matter what, even if a teacher afterwards raise to 80%. ...
The most important thing with a grading system is that it's predictable and perceived fair. Retroactivity makes it everything but. Therefore I do not recommend it.
Where Ekström uses the word "deal", common law uses the word "contract", and "breaking your end of the bargain" could be called "fraud".
Another example supporting this view was posted:
Working as a private investigator without passing the required classes and staying up with continuing education is a crime. If I took the class and later the teacher changed the requirements and the system retroactively failed me, that would expose me, the student, to criminal charges.
A different view was expressed by Tim Hunt:
As a teacher, you are only human. Sometimes you make mistakes. You accidentally create a quiz with a passing grade of 90% (or forget to set the passing grade so it defaults ot 0%?). Then some students attempt the quiz and point out the mistake to you, so then you correct it to 80% and expect Moodle to automatically fix the completion state for students who already got between 80 and 90%.
It was suggested that if the teacher knows they made a mistake and are correcting it, they can also correct the results of that mistake - manually changing passes to fails or vice-versa.
That is the open question - if settings/requirements are changed, should Moodle automatically, retroactively change prior completions based on the new settings?
