User Guides
Creating a gradebook category If you have a lot of assessed items in your QMplus course area, you may find that the number of columns in your gradebook becomes unwieldy. You can bring some order to your gradebook through the use of categories. These provide a way not only to group your gradebook columns but also to perform custom grade calculations based on grade items in a category, for example giving different categories different weightings. This guide shows you how to go about adding a category to the gradebook in your course area and how to get gradebook items in to that new category. ……………………………………………….…………………………………………………...…………………
Go to the gradebook in your course area. You will find this by clicking on Course administration > Grades in the Settings block. 1. In this example, I already have two quizzes in my course so there are two columns in the gradebook. I’m going to have lots of quizzes in my course, so I decide that I will group these together into a “Quizzes” category. 2. To add a category, click on Categories and Items, in the Settings block. Next select Simple view User Guides
Click on the Add Category button. 1. The title for your category is what will appear as a heading in the gradebook. The aggregation defines how items in the category are combined to give the total for the category. 2. This section allows you to specify details about the category such as what the maximum possible grade is and whether the total is hidden from the student or not. 3. There are more options available in both the Grade category section and the Category total section. You can see these by clicking the Show Advanced button. Here I have simply entered a category name and left the other settings with their defaults. User Guides
The new category appears in my gradebook view as a folder. I now want to move my existing grade book items for my two quizzes into my new category. 1. I select the items I wish to move by checking the boxes in the Select column. 2. I select the category I wish to move the grade items to from the drop down list. Now both of my quizzes are in the Quizzes category. User Guides
If I go back to the gradebook, I can see that there is a new Quizzes heading at the top. I can collapse the Quizzes section by clicking on the “-­‐“ to the right of the Quizzes text. Now all I see is the category total, instead of seeing all of the items in the category. User Guides
If I add any more quizzes to my course area, I can put the grades for them into the Quizzes category through the drop down menu in the Grade section of the quiz settings. ……………………………………………….…………………………………………………...………………… If you are going to have a large number of assesed items in your course area, it is worth thinking about the configuration of the gradebook as far in advance as possible. How many assessed items are you going to have? How much do each of them contribute to the final course grade? How might they best be organised? Thinking about these things and setting up the gradebook structure in advance will save you time later and will ultimately make things clearer for both staff and students. Further information at: qmplus.qmul.ac.uk. To view additional help files visit http://tinyurl.com/cz5toas Produced by the E-­‐Learning Unit at Queen Mary University of London