Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Andrew Zoltay -
Number of replies: 6

Hi folks,

I'm not sure this is the right forum for this discussion, so please let me know if I'm off base.

We use 3 different "Letter scales" at our institution: one for undergraduate courses, one for graduate courses and one for non-credit courses.

The problem:
We run a lot of courses that require differing "letter scales", so the default "site" Letter scale only helps for about half the courses.  We would then have to assign the other Letter scales to each course (somewhere between 200-300) manually.  Not a tempting endevour.

Potential solutions:
1. Automate the creation of new "letter scales" for each course - this fills up the grade_letters table with a lot of duplicate entries and isn't all that efficient, but keeps with the existing Moodle architecture.

2. Customize the "Letter scales" section so that it can support multiple "site level" letter scales and assign the appropriate Letter scale to the course.  This would centralize the "letter scales" without having a complete letter scale in the grade_letter table for each course.

Looking for other ideas or input - maybe something I've overlooked.

Thank you!

Cheers,
Andy

In reply to Andrew Zoltay

Re: Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Nancy K Hoke -

Andy - thank you so much for posting this - I am in very similar situation and I am very interested in the response.  Thank You.

Sincerely, Nancy K.

In reply to Andrew Zoltay

Re: Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Bob Puffer -

The grade_letters table utilizes a contextid to identify to which course the letter scale belongs.  This could be hierarchically adapted so a letter scale could apply to an entire category unless there was one for the course context contained in that category.

In reply to Bob Puffer

Re: Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Andrew Zoltay -

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the suggestion.  If I understand correctly, what you're saying is:
go into a course and update the letter "scale" then go into the table and reassign the contextids to that of a category which has all the courses that use that letter scale.

We had also looked at this process originally and were going to go with it, but the challenge for us is that our category structure would become too granular.  Our categories are ordered by school, department, then program, then specialization and there are both graduate, undergraduate and non-credit courses in each program/specialization.  We would still need to duplicate a lot of effort and have a complex category structure to boot.

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Andy

In reply to Andrew Zoltay

Re: Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Andrew Zoltay -

I was taking with a co-worker and I think we may have a solution.  Use the category strategy but create 3 categories that represent each of the Letter scales and drop the school, department and program/specialization categories below.  Now we just need to sell it to our business owners smile

Graduate (attach Graduate letter scale to this category)
School
Department
Program

Undergraduate (attach Graduate letter scale to this category)
School
Department
Program

Cheers,
Andy

In reply to Andrew Zoltay

Re: Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Bob Puffer -

This isn't possible under the current code-base.  My suggestion was just a starting point, indicating that some of the tabular infrastructure already exists if code could be modified to take advantage of a wider "scope" of contextids.

In reply to Bob Puffer

Re: Grade Letters in Moodle 2.0

by Andrew Zoltay -

I actually created a proof of concept that did work in version 2.0.1.  But it did involve a bit of technical trickery. smile  And it was only on courses that were in a single sub-category.

I set up a category structure looks like this:
Graduate
Masters
MyMastersLevelCourse 501
MyMastersLevelCourse 520

Undergraduate
BSC
MyBScLevelCourse 102
BA

Here's how I did it:
Step 1. I overrode the Letters scale for an individual course (MyMasterslevelCourse 101) so it was different than the site-wide Letters scale.
Step 2. I looked up the id in the context table for both the upper level category (Graduate) and the MyMasterslevelCourse 501 course.
Step 3. I then updated the grade_letters table setting the contextid for the course to the contextid for the Graduate category.
Step 4. Look at the Letters screen in the MyMastersLevelCourse 520 course and the letter scale now uses the one that was initially set up for the MyMasterslevelCourse 501.  Any course that falls under the Graduate category now uses the category level letter scale.
Step 5. Change the "Grade display type" under "Course grade settings" to any one that uses "Letter" and the new category level letter scale is applied to grade items.

There is no user-interface within Moodle to do this, but it appears as though the context paradigm applies.

Cheers,
Andy