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Moodle's gradebook is a powerful tool for sharing grades and feedback with students and calculating final grades. The gradebook provides several different options for how to calculate and display grades. We recommend you configure your gradebook before the start of the semester. This page outlines the major functions involved in configuring the gradebook and provides links to step-by-step instructions.
Understanding the default aggregation method
Understanding the default aggregation method
Moodle gradebooks at IU use a default aggregation method called Natural weighting, which you can configure to accommodate a variety of grading approaches.
What it does:
Finds the sum of points for all items in the category.
Allows grade items to be marked as Extra Credit.
Allows categories to use Drop the lowest when specific criteria are met. Please see Grade Category Options in the Moodle Gradebook.
When to use it:
To see the total number of points a student has earned out of the total points possible. It is also possible to change a category total to display a percentage of points earned instead of the real numerical points.
It is much easier when setting up your course, to plan, create and organize your gradebook first. You can do this by creating Moodle activities, adding manual grade items, and creating categories to contain similar grade items. This section is an overview of ways to set up your gradebook and descriptions of major gradebook functions.
When you add activities (e.g., Assignments or Quizzes) to a Moodle course, corresponding grade items (columns) are added to the course gradebook. Moodle also lets you manually add columns to your gradebook to record extra grade items (e.g., if you administer an offline midterm exam). In both of these cases, it's fine to build your gradebook as you go, but when it's time to calculate final grades, the organization of these items is essential to making sure you get the correct results.
To Begin, enter your course and select Grades from the navigation pane, which will bring you by default to the Grader report.
Grade Scales
Grade Scales
A default grade scale is published in the top of each course template in Moodle. Faculty should open this item prior to the start of term and verify the grade scale accurately reflects the department approved scale. If it does not, select edit and adjust each line item accordingly. Remember to Save your changes.
Points versus Percentages
Points versus Percentages
Point based:
Point based:
We highly recommend building courses using a point based model. By default, graded items are weighted according to the point values assigned to them. As you add or remove grade items, or change their point values, the relative weights (listed in the Weights column for each item) will automatically adjust (as a rule, values in the Weights column must always sum to 100).
For example, a 100-point assignment is worth twice as much as a 50-point assignment. You can think of this as “weighting by points,” and is useful if you tend to, e.g., have quizzes worth 10 points each while an exam might be worth 100 points. Consider creating and adding a table as shown below for your course and inserting into your course syllabus.
Percentage (weighted) based:
Percentage (weighted) based:
Alternatively, you can “weight by percentage” where you override the default weight for a given item based on how much you would like it to count regardless of its actual point value. The percentage based gradebook is less forgiving and much more complicated to maintain and update should you make a change to your course.
For instance, you might have an assignment, a quiz, and an exam, each worth 100 points, but you can set the assignment to be worth 5% of the course grade, the quiz worth 10%, and the exam worth 20%. To do this, simply check the box next to the percentage weight in the Weights column for a particular item and enter the new weight; when you do this, generally you should override each entry and specify the weights explicitly, though this is not a requirement, and any you do not specify will automatically adjust to ensure the Weights column sums to 100. Note that if you make any changes, be sure to click [Save changes].
Note: if having issues where it appears Moodle is resetting your weights each time you enter them. Please note you need to add all weights at once and save in one action. Otherwise Moodle will force the calculation to equal 100%. The key is changing all weights at the same time.
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