Moodle Advanced Gradebook: Weighted Grades

version 1.9

Use the following method if you want to use Moodle to display weighted grades for your course. For instance, lets say that in your course there will be the following rubric:

The nice thing about this system is, you can have one assignment to grade in each part above, or multiple, it will all work the same way. What that means is, I might have only one column for class participation, which I'll total up myself. Homework could be two different assignments worth different points. There could be three papers and one final. No matter the number of assignments that make up each weighted part, it will all work out the same.

Set up the Gradebook

Click on Grades from the Homepage and under Administration. You should be in the View, as shown in the upper left hand corner, called Grader report. There are other views available in the drop down menu. The columns in the gradebook are created automatically from Moodle activities like gradeable Forums or the Assignment tool. You enter the grade from the activity tool and it will appear in the gradebook. So any assignments you have created on Moodle will automatically be here. If you are creating columns yourself, you'll need to add them via the gradebook.

Add Categories

Click on the View dropdown menu in the upper left hand corner of the screen and select Categories and items. If you haven't added any columns yet, you'll simply see the name of your course and a Course total below that. The first thing we need to do is click on the edit hand to the right of your course name. Under the Aggregation dropdown menu, select Weighted mean of grades, uncheck the Aggregate including subcategories box and then click the Save Changes button.

Now we're ready to setup some categories. Click on the Add category button to bring up the following form.

Fill out the Category name. Under the Aggregation dropdown menu, select Sum of grades. Change the Item weight to the weight of that item. In this example, Class Participation is worth 10% of the course grade, so I put a 10 in the field. Finally, click the Save Changes button.

Repeat this process for each of your categories. In my example, I've added four categories as you can see below.

Add Grade Columns

If you are using assignments and forums and quizzes that you've already created in Moodle, you may not need to add your own columsn. If you don't have a column for an assignment and need to add new grade columns, click the Add Grade item button.

Fill out the item (grade column) name. If you want to assign a number grade, leave the grade type at value. Change the Maxiumum grade as needed. For this example I'm doing 10 participation points for 16 weeks, so my total is 160. At the bottom, change the Grade category pulldown to select which category this assignment falls under. For this example it is Class Participation. Then click the Save Changes button.

Repeat this process for each of your grade columns. In my example, I've added seven graded items as you can see below.

Editing Grades

At this point our gradebook is completely setup, and whenever we are ready, we can enter grades. To do this, click on the View dropdown menu in the upper left hand corner of the screen and select Grader report. To edit your grades, click on the Turn editing On button in the upper right hand corner.

In this spreadsheet view you can access the cells in the gradebook and change any grade manually. The top box is for the grade and the bottom box is for textual comments or feedback for the student. When you are done entering grades and/or comments, click the Update button to save them.

When you are done you will see your grades listed. I have an example screenshot below with the middle taken out so you can see the course total column.

If you enter in anything in the calculated columns, they will be overwritten and no longer calculate on their own. This is done intentionally so that if you want to override a grade, Moodle won't delete that. If this isn't what you want, you can fix it by turning your editing on when on the Grader report. For the cell that isn't calculating, click on the edit hand for that cell. By this I mean the exact row it is happening on. In that edit screen it should have the box Overridden checked at the top. Uncheck this box and click the Save Changes button. Now Moodle will calculate that column.

by samoore © 2008