Using the Moodle Gradebook: Two Scenarios
It’s worth noting at the outset that the main reason for using the Moodle gradebook—as opposed to a
spreadsheet or paper gradebook—is that a correctly set up Moodle gradebook will allow your students to
know exactly where their course grade stands at any point in the semester. One of the most common
remarks we see in students’ evaluations of courses is that they don’t know how they’re doing in a course
and wish they could see their grades on an ongoing basis. By setting up the Moodle gradebook, you can
address this reasonable student expectation and inform students when they need help.
The Moodle gradebook offers many choices—too many, it might be said—and therefore ample opportunity
for error in setup if an instructor includes such options as subcategories, extra credit, dropping the lowest
grade, or custom scales. And once an instructor has begun to enter grades in the gradebook,
troubleshooting becomes quite difficult, due to the importance of not altering or deleting students’ grades. In
general, simpler is better, especially when using the gradebook for the first time. The instructions here
assume a fairly simple set of graded course activities and two grading scenarios—one using categories of
graded activities and one in which a certain number of points is assigned to each activity, with the course
grade calculated as the percentage of points earned out of the total possible points. For help with more
complex grading scenarios, see documentation at: http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Gradebook.
WEIGHTED CATEGORY SCENARIO
In this scenario, you first set up categories of items to grade (assignments, quizzes, exams, discussion
forums, etc.), and then you add items within those categories. You have options to record scores as
percentages or as points counting toward a category total; you can assign various weights to categories of
items; you can create assignments and other activities in the course itself, such that they automatically
create items in the grade book. In this example, we will set up the Moodle gradebook with categories,
weight those categories, and add items within categories. We begin with the categories to be used and the
weights assigned to them:
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Discussion (Forums): 20%
Assignments: 30%
Quizzes: 30%
Midterm: 10%
Final: 10%
Moodle gives you the options of setting up the gradebook at once, with all categories and items, or of
creating forums, assignments, and other activities in the course itself, such that they automatically create
items in the appropriate gradebook categories. If you choose the latter option, you don’t want to enter those
items when setting up the gradebook, as they will duplicate the items created automatically. It’s possible to
set up forums, assignments, and other activities that aren’t included in gradebook categories or
calculations—just make sure they are set as Uncategorized in the Grade category setting of the activity
you’re creating in the course. For this scenario, the quizzes, midterm, and final will not be created as
activities in the course, so they will be entered as items in the corresponding categories in the grade book,
and scores will be entered there as well, rather than in the course.
To start, go to Grades in the Administration block, then use the Choose an action drop-down menu to
choose Full view under Categories and items. This is what you see:
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Click on the Add category button at the bottom to add a category and enter the Category name.
Farther down on the same screen, the maximum grade for discussion forums has been left at the default
100, so scores will range from 0 to 100. Enter a different value, if necessary, but you can use 100 as the
maximum grade consistently and use category weighting to determine how much a given category is
counted toward the final grade. It’s possible to enter a score exceeding the maximum grade you’ve set (e.g.,
for extra credit), but this must be done by turning on editing and clicking on the editing “gear” icon in the
gradebook cell (see below, right) from the Grade report. Enter the desired score in the Final grade field.
No need to change anything else on this screen. Continue to create the other grade categories, making
sure to Save changes after each one.
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You end up with the Categories and items screen pictured below. We want to assign different weights to
categories, as indicated by the percentages listed previously. Choose Weighted mean of grades from the
Aggregation drop-down menu next to the name of your course. The Aggregation type for each category is
the default, Simple weighted mean of grades. This means that, within the category, the gradebook will
calculate the total points a student receives as a percentage of the total points possible. In the Weight
column for each category, enter the percentage or portion of the total assigned to each category
(Discussion 20%, Assignments 30%, etc.). These weights don’t have to add up to 100%, as they are
relative to each other. For example, if quizzes and assignments each count twice as much as the
discussions, midterm, and final, they could be weighted 2 each, and the other categories would be
weighted 1 each. But the weighted grading scheme is easier to understand if weights add up to 100%.
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When you set up weighted categories this way, it’s possible to add additional items within categories later—
either in the gradebook or automatically when you create new activities in the course. The gradebook will
still calculate the total points a student receives as a percentage of the total points possible for each grade
category.
In the screen shot above, note that all boxes in the Aggregate only non-empty grades column are
checked (this is the default). This means that the gradebook will correctly calculate a student’s overall
course average at any given time, based only on grades that have been entered, rather than on grades for
all items in the course. If you enter a score of “0” for an assignment that a student failed to submit, that
score is calculated in the category and course averages. But items that have not been graded yet do not
figure into those averages.
At the bottom of the screen, click on Add grade item to add items within categories. In this example, items
are added in the Quizzes, Midterm, and Final categories only, because Discussion and Assignment items
will be created automatically when those Activities are created in the course itself.
When you create an item, be sure to enter the appropriate Maximum grade, if you want something other
than the default 100. Also be sure to select the appropriate Grade category from the drop-down at the
bottom of the screen. In the example below, note that an item, Final, has been created in the category,
Final. It is very important to create an item for any grade that is to be entered, even if there is only one item
in a category. Entering a grade in a category itself will cause miscalculations in the gradebook.
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If you forget to choose a category for an item, you can easily move the item into the appropriate category
by clicking on the Move icon in the right-hand column corresponding to the item you want to move. You can
also move several items by clicking on the corresponding boxes in the right-hand column and choosing the
target category from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page (see below).
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For graded activities that you create in the course itself, such as discussion forums, assignments, and
quizzes, you set due dates and other information where you set up the activity in the course, rather than in
the gradebook. When you’ve entered all categories and items, the gradebook looks like the screen shot
below. Notice that there are different maximum grades entered for the items in the Assignments category.
These values were entered when the assignments were created as activities in the course and appeared
automatically in the gradebook Assignments category. To change these maximum grade values or those
for Discussion items, you would update them in the course, not the gradebook, using Update mode.
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The Discussion and Assignment items that were created in the course and added automatically to the
grade book have the corresponding icons next to them and are clickable to allow you to go to a selected
forum or assignment from the grade book.
That’s it! To enter grades, use the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of the page to select Grader
report. Remember that you won’t enter grades for forums or assignments here; you’ll do that from those
activities in the course itself. Note that in the current version of Moodle (2.4), it is not necessary to turn
editing on—that button is used to edit the gradebook itself (items, categories, etc.). Just click on a cell in the
Grader report to enter a grade, and the fields for the numerical score and a narrative comment appear,
along with name of the student and the item you are grading, which appear as text “floating” over the cell.
This is helpful when you have a long list of students and many gradebook items, such that you can’t see
the top row that identifies the items and/or the far-left column that lists student names. You can, however,
click in the area immediately above the row with item names and then use your keyboard’s up/down and
left/right cursor keys to scroll around the gradebook.
Click in this area to
use cursor keys to
scroll in gradebook.
When you set up an assignment, discussion forum, or other activity in your Moodle course, grades are
normally entered from the activity itself. But you can enter grades for such items directly in the gradebook,
in which case the cell becomes shaded, like the Assignment items in the screen shot above.
To see a student’s grade report, click on the box next to his/her name in the Grader report:
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The User report displays a student’s grades as s/he sees them from the Grades area in the Moodle course:
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Do the math…
Let’s look at the math underlying the calculations in the grade report above. For Discussion, Curious
George received the six scores totaling 515 out of a possible 600 points, for a category average of 85.83%.
The forums were set up to record the instructor’s highest rating for all of a student’s posts in each forum.
You can also set forums to record a grade book score based on the maximum, minimum, sum, or count of
ratings.
For Assignments, each item was worth a different number of maximum points: 20, 30, 40, 30, 50 (see page
6 above). Curious George received a total of 131 points out of a possible 170 points, for a category
average of 77.06%.
For quizzes, Curious George received a total of 235 points out of a possible 300, for a category average of
78.33%. Since there was only one midterm and final, and the maximum for each was 100, the category
percentage is the same as the scores received for each.
Multiply each category’s average by its weight:
Discussion:
Assignments:
Quizzes:
Midterm:
Final:
Course average:
85.83 x .2 =
77.06 x .3 =
78.33 x .3 =
70.00 x .1 =
85.00 x .1 =
17.17
23.12
23.50
7.00
8.50
79.29 (The difference of .01% is attributable to rounding.)
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TOTAL POINTS SCENARIO
You can also set up the gradebook so that it simply records points for each graded item and calculates the
student’s total points earned as a percentage of the total points possible. In this scenario, you don’t need
categories, but you can still group like items together, and you can still set up the gradebook to calculate
the student’s grade based only on those items that have been graded, not on the total points possible for
the course.
We’ll use the same items in this scenario, but we won’t create categories for them, and we’ll set the course
aggregation method to Simple weighted mean of grades:
On the Edit categories and items: Full view screen, the box for Aggregate only non-empty grades
should be checked. This means that the gradebook will correctly calculate a student’s overall course grade
at any given time, based only on items for which points have been entered, rather than on points for all
items in the course. In this scenario, Curious George’s grade report looks like this:
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The math again…
In the User report above, the student has not yet completed the final exam. If you add up the total course
points possible from the Edit categories and items: Full view above, you get a total of 1270 points:
Discussion:
600 points
Assignments: 170 points
Quizzes:
300 points
Midterm:
100 points
Final:
100 points
Total: 1,270 points
The gradebook simply looks at all graded items (i.e., all items except the final, worth 100 points) and
calculates the student’s total points earned (951) as a percentage of the total points possible (1,170), or
81.28%. As in the weighted categories scenario, you can add items “on the fly,” if you wish. The gradebook
will continue to calculate a course average based on the student’s earned points as a percentage of total
points possible.
This total points approach to the gradebook is the simplest to set up, but it’s important to understand that it
involves a de facto weighting of grades. The Simple weighted mean aggregation method looks only at point
value, so in the scenario above, 47.2% (600 of 1270 points) of the course grade is based on Discussion,
while 7.9% (100 of 1270 points) is based on the Final. Therefore, the instructor is effectively weighting
Discussion much more than in the weighted categories scenario.
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