IMO, in the vast majority of use cases, a grade is derived as a numerical value earned quantified against the maximum numerical value earnable, i.e., Points or "Marks, in some locales.
All of the modules that feed grades to the gradebook do so with this same system of points or marks.
In such cases, the percentage grade and therefore, the letter grade is derived from a combination of actual earned points or marks against the maximum available. This grade may be weighted to cascade different results up to its parents but the same basic building block is always the starting point for any calculations in the gradebook (under the aforementioned use cases).
I learned most of what I know about computers from left-handed cousins so you never know how much truth or BS is in there at times but...
It would seem to me that the most basic building block of so important a mechanism as the gradebook should NOT be stored as a calculated entity. It should always be raw (points or marks or whatever you want to call it). Grade items are stored as raw points. Should categories be stored calculated? The fields in the grade_grades table even say rawgrade, rawgrademax, rawgrademin.
I good deal of the confusion experienced by my instructors surrounds this issue -- when they see what Moodle has "calculated up" as the category total, they wonder what's up? Is it not smart enough to add the item grade values together to get a total? This occurs in the display of ranges for grades on the Grader and User reports and display on Categories and Items.
Other explanations for this (IMO "mis)behavior would surely be welcome.
Bob, sorry, can you please include an example: e.g. what Moodle does in one of the scenarios, and what it should do/show instead?
Sorry, this should have gone to the General Developer forum.