Gradebook

We are seeing this issue as well, and are not sure if it is a bug or if the faculty are doing it themselves.

If you'd like a quick and dirty code fix to stop teachers from modifying those columns, here is the code we modified that prevents teachers from updating the course total or category total columns in the Grader Report. We just went live with this change today, so it is untested - use at your own risk!

In /grade/report/grader/lib.php @line 1037, change this:

if ($this->get_pref('quickgrading') and $grade->is_editable()) {

To:

if ($this->get_pref('quickgrading') and $grade->is_editable() and $item->itemtype != 'category' and $item->itemtype != 'course') {

And at line 1528, immediately after the $editicon = ''; line, add this:

if( $element['type'] == 'grade' && ($element['object']->grade_item->itemtype == 'category' || $element['object']->grade_item->itemtype == 'course') )
{
return '<div class="grade_icons" />';
}

if(strpos($element['type'], 'category') !== FALSE || strpos($element['type'], 'course') !== FALSE)
{
return '<div class="grade_icons" />';
}

That should completely prevent the teachers (and anyone else) from modifying those columns of the grade report. It should be possible to add some more conditional logic so that managers or administrators could still override grades but teachers could not, but that wasn't a requirement for us, so I didn't look into it.

We are hoping that this change will stop the flood of overridden grades, and if it doesn't, then at least we'll be able to rule out manual overrides by the teachers as the source.

Edit to add: we are using Moodle 2.4+ (Build: 20121230)

Refer to this track number for why course totals are being overridden.  Two browser windows open with grade ready to be updated, and one browser updated and then the other updated, and course totals get overridden....

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-38732