Gradebook in Moodle

Gradebooks in Moodle are a very powerful tool but they can be confusing to set up or otherwise mold to your needs. The key is that whatever your Moodle gradebook does, it needs to match your syllabus. 

Designing a Gradebook

Most teachers grade based on categories of work valued at percentages of the course total. If you’re not going to use the Moodle Gradebook, you’ll want to hide it from your students.

Example Percentage Layout

In situations where your syllabus has grades broken down into points like so:

Attendance & Participation: 10%
Quizzes: 20%
Homework: 40%
Midterm & Final Exams: 30%
Total is of course 100%

You will set up your Course total with Natural aggregation and any categories with Simple Weighted Mean of Grades aggregation.

Each of the above items: Quizzes, Homework, Midterm, and Final Exams will be a category of its own, recommended in that order, populated with the appropriate grade items to add up to the total Course total worth of 100 points with each category being worth its percent value multiplied by 100 (so 20 percent (%) becomes 20 points).

You can set up Portion/Percent-Based Categories and then populate your gradebook with Moodle Activities or Manual Grade items for work done outside of Moodle.

You can also tweak your gradebook to:

NOTE: If your Course total uses points (rather than 100%) then you should setup your course total and any categories using Natural aggregation.

Entering Grades

If a grade item is expressed with an icon that is solid grey it lives only in the gradebook and should be graded there. The most efficient way to do this is often using Single View to manage work one at a time.

If the icon for the activity has color to it it’s a Moodle activity and should be graded within the activity, which will then automatically feed into the gradebook.
These grades can be manually overridden in the gradebook. We have instructions for grading Assignment Turn-ins, grading rated Forums, and manually grading Quizzes.

What appears on the default page of the gradebook (the Grader Report) may not be fully accurate as may calculate in unused or hidden items incorrectly.

To ensure you communicate a consistent message to your students use the User report tab in the gradebook and select a student to see their gradebook feedback and grade exactly as they’d see it.

Troubleshooting

The Moodle gradebook does NOT tie into MyClackamas, you’ll need to manually copy over any grade data to MyClackamas. This process is included in our End of Term Reminder Checklist.

Sometimes totals may not appear correctly, maybe the grade is way to low or high- this is probably related to the exclude empty grades setting or from having grade items hidden from students (students will see a grade without those hidden items whereas you will see the calculation including them.)

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