Gradebook

Hi WP, I sent our code to Jason, but we haven't released it publically yet, as we need to get student view set up.

You can see a feature demo here, which describes the features with screen shots:
http://learn.humboldt.edu/course/view.php?id=21&topic=6

And if you want to try it out, you can go here and login as test/test (teacher view, just click on grades to see the gradebook). Test is a non-editing teacher, but you can see and change things in the gradebook (since the gradebook just pulls from the standard module's grades tables, it is entirely non-destructive, no actual grades are changed, just the way they are calculated)
http://learn.humboldt.edu/course/view.php?id=21&topic=6

It all works, so feel free to login as one of the demo students, take some quizzes, and then go back in as teacher and play with the weighting settings, etc.

This site may show some odd behavior as we are testing fresh code on it.

Hi Michael!

Didn't you post some gradebook files somewhere the other day??

There is so much activity going on around the gradebook (that is really cool) these days it is hard to keep up with who is doing what.

A while back, I put up a site [v1.5 Dev (2004090600)] just to test the updated GradeBook.  The one I have up has the initial GB2 files with Jean-Michel's modification.  It was throwing some errors which I am sure has been either fixed or the script changed by now.
http://s94988317.onlinehome.us/moodlegrade

Login:
teacher1010/teacher1010
student01/student01

So much has changed that I would like to put up a fresher version. 

WP1

Thanks for the reply, Josh!

Gradebook programs have a lot of niceties such as excusing an individual student from an assignment.

We're working on this feature next, alot of our faculty also want that. We wanted to get the basic features up and running and test their performance. So far, there doesn't seem to be a major performance hit running the gradebook calcs in php, so we'll add a few more features.

To enter grades, I use a traditional spreadsheet style format where I can go down the row quickly and enter their participation, any check off assignments, or all of their paper assignments I graded.

What we're planning for this is a direct graded assignment type, which you enter directly from the gradebook. This would be for grading offline work when the teacher doesn't want to use the assignment module.

I'd prefer this method than to make grades that are normally grades via the modules editable, as this seems like it could add a good deal of confusion to the process (and confusion = support calls.

a couple situations that I use moodle for is at the high schoool level of students.   A lot of work is completed and turned in via printing, visual checkoff sheets, etc.  In fact the idea of uploading and viewing 300 papers a day via the online courseroom is unmanagable at this point, so I still utilize paper, visual checkoffs, participation points... all of which are graded outside of moodle. 

To enter grades, I use a traditional spreadsheet style format where I can go down the row quickly and enter their participation, any check off assignments, or all of their paper assignments I graded.  In moodle I have to scroll down a very large screen for each class.

I also must turn in administrative grades each quarter to my administrators.  They do not look very friendly printed off of this screen.  Gradebook programs have a lot of niceties such as excusing an individual student from an assignment.  Here I would need to go into each assignment and enter something, rather than running along a spreadsheet editable fields and entering something.

I have 6 courses with 200 students total and 90 assignments, that makes 18,000 grade entries every six months.  Which is probably fairly common in a busy high school. 

Feedback??? not at this point, but I like the feature in my advanced classes.  I just think that we could take some information from currently developed full blown grade book programs, most of which use a gridded spreadsheet.

just my two cents worth.

Josh

Hi Josh, perhaps you can help me with a scenario of why editing grades in the gradebook would be desirable. It seems to me that it would add alot more work for the instructors.

For instance, I can see the case where I give a quiz and then realize that a question or more are unfair or mistaken. So maybe I would want to give points back to students to make up for it (solution 1). But wouldn't it be better to drop that question from the quiz instead, and have the quiz module recalculate the grades(solution2)?

In solution 1, I have to go in and manually edit all of the students grades, while in 2, the system handles it for me. The situation is even worse if there are random questions, now I have to check every single quiz report, go back to the gradebook, and add points to the student's who got the erroneous questions. Again, it seems to me that it would be alot less work to let the quix module handle it's own grades and just report a number when the gradebook queries.

For assignments, our faculty at least love the current grading set up, where you can see the student's submission, give feedback, and change grades all from one place. Since this is directly linked from the gradebook, so from a student's grade you can link to the assignment in question, it seems a bit redundent to have the grades in one place and the feedback in another.

Anyway, maybe you can help me with some scenarios where you would want to edit student's grades manually, one at a time, in the gradebook?

I think you have a beautiful design here.  Just my two cents worth, but having PHP do the load work is certainly a quick way to get it up and running.  However, I do think that the database should be doing that much calculations in the long run.  It seems that what you have would work very nice with centralized tables, which seem to be developing in other forms by reading the posts.

I do like the feedback ability in moodle, but it seems that the grades are the priority for now.  Being able to work with only grades, while feedback was a part of the modules would be ideal.  this would allow teacher to export/import numerical data, with the options to give feedback by entering individual assignments later on.

Personally, and I think I read this elsewhere, All of moodle needs to revisit this issue for it to work properly.  Each module needs updating, or there needs to be a CVS branch for this purpose.  centralized grades with module feedback? possible? 

And there is a post later in this thread that really summed it up well, 1, 2, 3, and 4 options listed need to be editable fields if possible.  Probably a fairly speedy performance operation if the backend is taken care of correctly.

however, you are definantly working out some issues here...  good luck and I would be happy to have some of this code to test it out with.

Josh

This will work as a 'curve from' value. eg, you type in a number and all grades in that catagory will be curved from that grade.

So if the high score on a 100 pt test was 89, you can curve all grades from 89=100.

I had 10 users (as teachers) hit the gradebook in a 140 student class with 22 graded items. We had a momentary processor spike, and all gradebooks we're returned in about 2 seconds.

Memory usage was minimal.

Hi Jean, we're having a hard time wrapping our heads around this one for a quiz or lesson where the grade is based on average scores.

If you manually edit the grade, these seems like a philosophical and technical conflict? If you edit the grade, then the student takes the quiz again, what happens?

Should you only be able to edit the grade when the quiz is closed and should the system keep track of this or are we going to rely on the users?

Finally, if we put a modifier on the catagory, eg 'add 5 points' to the final grades for this catagory, wouldn't that accomplish the same thing?

For things like assignment, of course the grades are set and reset at the instructor's will via the assignment's own interface, but for automatically graded items, esp. ones where the final grade is based on mean score, it seems like a bit of a problem?

Hi Bryan!

I am not a programmer.  Just giving some of my ideas to those working on this mod.

It is very nice for you to offer this.  I am sure it will speed up development by the developers.

WP1

Jason,  Michael and other GB players,

If you would like to conference with my Elluminate vRoom to share screens, ideas and feedback from others, you are welcome to do so. Simply set a time and send out the invites.

Bryan

Great features Micheal.

We should set up a time to talk to merge our two projects! You've got the interface and some nice features, and we've got the centralized table and some other features. I think we're building chocolate and peanut butter here... Let's bring our two great tastes together!

Can you send me the code you have now? I'd like to review it with Maria and then maybe the four of us can get a conference call going to finish this off.

Hi Jill, we're going to look into adding a 'curve' function (next to the 'drop the x lowest') so that you could add more points or add a 'curve' multiplyer for a catagory.

However, these sorts of operations may add more processing load, so we wanted to get the basic version tested first.

Of course, you could also add a 5 point assignment to the same catagory as the quiz and give everyone 5 points on it.

Yes I think reprinting row headers is both simple and fine.

Another thing that I like is the possibility for the teacher to view all grades for a given student, this is really what we need :

1. grid view (all grades for all students)
2. column view (one grade for all students)
3. row view (all grades for one student)
4. cell view (single grade for one student)

And at least 2,3,4 should allow editing (1 if we can)

Being able to choose order by (name, first name, grades from a column) would also be usefull

Bravo! Great work!

I think reprinting row headers is just fine, especially if teachers can set a preference.

I know that you're not looking for requests, but how difficult would it be to add a way in the gradebook to override a quiz score in the database? In other words, if I discover that a question wasn't really fair, or that I want to give everyone 5 more points, it would be really nice to be able to just input a new value for the whole quiz.

I think GUI is a lot better than GB2 !!

Personnaly I absolutely need calculated columns, weighted colums would not be enought. (I use calculated column to "group" tests of various students groups in one grade)

I am very interested by your tests on scalability.

Is the gradebook centralized.  I know there was some discussion of this in another thread.

Nope, it runs off the same method as the standard gradebook (polling all the various grade tables in all the modules).

Advantage is there is no need to add code to the modules, just replace grades.php and grade.php in your course directory, it will create some tables the first time it runs, and then you're all set (once Jeff gets the code done for that.

Disadvantage is you are doing your calculations and sorts via php rather than with your database.

We're going to run some larger scale tests next week and try to get an idea of the load this will add when a number of faculty hit the gradebook at the same time.

As far as I can tell, the question to answer (wrt to a centralized grades tabl): is php capable of running the gradebook math without too much trouble or is it necessary to offload the math onto the database?

Hi Michael!

Very nice!

Is the gradebook centralized.  I know there was some discussion of this in another thread.

WP1