any way to excuse an assignment for a student?

any way to excuse an assignment for a student?

by J P -
Number of replies: 4

I have recently moved from another gradebook program to Moodle's gradebook.  The only thing I really haven't figured out how to do is excusing an assignment for particular students.  For example, if a student is absent and isn't responsible  for the work, I want the assignment to act as though it never existed for the student.  My previous software allowed for this but I can't seem to do it in Moodle.

I use the Sum of Grades calculation for the grade.

For example:

Student A has all 3 assignments completed:

24/25, 50/50 and 95/100 = 169/175 = 96.5%

Student B was absent on the day that the 25 point assignment was done, so I want that student's grade to calculate as:

40/50 and 75/100 = 115/150 = 76.7%

 

Any ideas?  Thanks!

In reply to J P

Re: any way to excuse an assignment for a student?

by Helen Foster -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Hi,

Have you tried turning editing on in the grader report then clicking the edit icon for a particular cell and then ticking the excluded checkbox and saving changes. Please let us know whether this method works (as I'm not absolutely sure!)

In reply to Helen Foster

Re: any way to excuse an assignment for a student?

by J P -

Helen - It works, but I think that the resulting report is misleading.  If you look at the screenprints below, you can see that the overall grade is correct (98 vs 143 points earned).  The range of possible points still shows as 150 for both though.  In the case where one assignment is excluded, I'd want it to show 100 instead of 150.  That's how the previous software I used worked.  It made it easy for students to divide their earned points by their possible points to check their grades.

Attachment exclude.jpg
In reply to J P

Re: any way to excuse an assignment for a student?

by Michael Woods -
Picture of Core developers

Hi,

Have you considered using something like 'Simple Weighted Mean' (SWM) for your category aggregation, instead of 'Sum of Grades'? By default, SWM will ignore non-graded tasks, achieving what you want.

Consider this category/assignment setup in the gradebook:

categories and items view

Now consider Student A:

Student A Grades

Now consider Student B, with their first grade not entered:

Student B grades, with first assignment missing

That seems to achieve the same results, right?

Regards,
Michael 

In reply to Michael Woods

Re: any way to excuse an assignment for a student?

by J P -

Thanks, Michael.  I'll have to play around with this option.  This would require me to actually enter a 0 for a student who did not complete the assignment.  I generally didn't do that before and would just leave it blank.