User report does not look "logical"

User report does not look "logical"

by Joseph Rézeau -
Number of replies: 4
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Hi all gradebook users,

Although I'm an old hand at Moodle I have very rarely used the gradebook, so bear with me if this remark has been made before - and answered! I may even have asked the same question myself years ago and forgotten about it.

screenshot #1

The contents of the Grade and the Range "Course total" bottom cells do not look logical to me. I would expect the Course total/Grade cell to display 15.00 (5.00+10.00) and the Course total/Range cell to display 0-20.

Thanks in advance for an explanation.

Joseph

In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: User report does not look "logical"

by Bob Puffer -

Ahhh... the old "points vs real grade" frothing. Moodle largely assumes that every grade is going to be out of 100 so when it calculates "grade" that's what goes there -- the absolute equivalent of percentage. LAE Grader allows a teacher to display ACCURATEPOINTS whereby calcs are done on the fly to accurately display what I believe most people look for but without making any changes to the grade tables.

In reply to Bob Puffer

Re: User report does not look "logical"

by Joseph Rézeau -
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Thanks for trying to answer, Bob. Not sure I undersand it all, but the point I'm trying to make is that -in my example- the display of the Course total/Grade cell (75) and of the Course total/Range cell 0-100 are totally redundant with the display of the Course total/Percentage cell (75%). I maintain that it would "look" more logical for the first 2 Course Total cells to show the totals of the Grade and Range columns. When e.g. I read the Grade column vertically from top to bottom, it adds up to 15, not 75.

But maybe it's just me and my abysmally low level in Maths.mixed

Joseph

In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: User report does not look "logical"

by Bob Puffer -

No, you've got it right as does Robert above -- Moodle's core gradebook insists on making categories 100 points.  You can change that but there are tons of caveats such as:

  • changing along the way as the course progresses assuming you don't want to have non-marked items included in aggregation as zeroes (what a pain, change each time there's a new marking)
  • the range or max earnable points isn't the same in a lot of instances between students.  Many instructors want to allow a student to skip an activity and not have it counted against them so the max points put for the whole class will put that student's grade off.

The "Grade" column isn't logical unless accuratepoints (a term I use in the LAE Grader report) are maintained --- it is just a repeat of percentage.  This has been a long, hard fought war and the core gradebook remains the same.  Best thing you can do for the students is to hide the Grade and Range columns (unless your category happens to add up to 100) and show percentage and letter (not likely to be satisfactory to most students as it doesn't permit them to check the accuracy of the grades).

In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: User report does not look "logical"

by Robert Russo -

Change your Course Total to 20 points and your course grade to Simple Weighted Mean.

This will give you the '15 points out of 20' that you want and still show the 75%.

Because your final grade is out of 100, it is normalizing the 75% out of 100, which gives 75 points.

Very simple fix without resorting to changing the entire gradebook institution wide.