Not understanding what I've found about Grade Weights. Help?

Not understanding what I've found about Grade Weights. Help?

by Billie Clark -
Number of replies: 1

First things first:  I am using Moodle 1.9.5.  I teach high school and I'm the only person using Moodle...running it on a regular Windows computer in my office that is only accessible through the school Intranet so there's nobody around here to ask. 

We are on 4X4 blocks meaning I teach 3 classes per semester with each semester consisting of two 9 week grading periods.  I figured out that in order for the grade showing to the students to be accurate for 2nd nine weeks, I need to make the grades for 1st nine weeks count 0% of the total...although I'm not sure I did it correctly.

I also need to make the grades calculate on a weighted average with Concepts counting 30%, Applications 40%, and CW 30%.  Where/how do I enter this stuff?  I've been messing with it for a couple of days and all I've managed to do is make it so my students don't see any calculated average at all...just individual grades.

Thanks for any help  you can offer!

In reply to Billie Clark

Re: Not understanding what I've found about Grade Weights. Help?

by Marius Pretorius -
Hello Billie

You need to create categories in your grade book. If you enable the tabs and drop down menu for the grade book it makes navigation a bit easier. You can set that at site administration>Grades>General Settings>Navigation Method.

In the grade book you will now see tabs at the top. Choose the 'Categories and Items' tab. At the bottom of the page you will see a button 'Add Category'. Choose that.

Depending on how your courses are structured you create the Categories you need. Let us say that your semester courses are separate Moodle courses. Then you need to create the categories for the two grading periods Eg. Term1, Term2. You also need the categories Concepts, Applications and CW. Don't worry too much about the structure for now i.e. where the categories fall, and what the weighting is - you can change that later. All you need to do to create the categories is fill in a name for the category, i.e. the first field - leave the rest.

Once you've done that, you can move the categories into place. Leave Term1 and Term2 as they are - they are the two main categories for your course. Move Concepts, Applications and CW into Term1. Create a further three categories with the same names and move them into Term2. You now have a block with Term1 and Term2, Term1 contains Concepts, Applications and CW. The same with Term2. Now you can set the weightings of the categories. The default is 100. Just do in on the page where you see all the categories and items. You can leave Term1 and Term2 as 100 if you like and change the other ones to 30, 40 and 30.

Having done that you move all the grade items (activities) that you have already created, whether the students have done them already or not, into the categories where they fall. That's all there is too it!

hth
Marius