Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Ray Morris -
Number of replies: 7

Your opinion is needed on a question of policy, of how Moodle should work in general.

 

Suppose there is an activity in a course, such as a quiz. The "grade to pass" for that activity is set to 70%.

The activity completion settings are set to say the student must pass the activity in order for it to be considered complete.

A student completes the activity with a 78%.  That's a passing score, so they are marked as passed and they continue through the course.

Some time later, the teacher changes the setting to say the new "grade to pass" is 80%.

The question is, had the student completed the activity, or should the new requirements be retroactive, affecting students who already completed?

If I were the student and I completed a course, maybe got a certificate or whatever and moved on with life, I'd be rather upset if the school later decided that I never completed it because they changed their grading policy retroactively.

That's doubly true for courses required for licensing and such by the government. I can't imagine if I take the course, completing it successfully, then when the regulators double check that I met the requirements for my license, the school says no, I failed, because after I passed they changed their mind about what score qualifies as passing, so I lose my license.

Someone mentioned that it made since to them to retroactively fail students when such a change is made, so we want to get a community consensus on which of the two is preferable.

 

What do you think:
1. A change like that be retroactive, changing students who had already passed to become "failed".

2. Once a student has passed, they passed.  New requirements should apply only to new students attempting the activity after the change.

 

Note - going back and retroactively re-computing completions and changing them would be quite a bit more complicated and prone to bugs.

 

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In reply to Ray Morris

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Per Ekström -

I would say, no.

As a student, you're given a deal; "Get a score of X or higher and you pass." If the bar is raised, and it's applied retroactively, then you are basicly breaking your end of the bargain. A pass is a pass no matter what, even if a teacher afterwards raise to 80%.

However, persons who have not yet passed the test should not get a free pass if they wrote 68% and the bar lowers to 60%, either. The sword cuts both ways. The most important thing with a grading system is that it's predictable and perceived fair. Retroactivity makes it everything but. Therefore I do not recommend it.

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In reply to Per Ekström

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

That is one scenario, but there are others:

As a teacher, you are only human. Sometimes you make mistakes. You accidentally create a quiz with a passing grade of 90% (or forget to set the passing grade so it defaults ot 0%?). Then some students attempt the quiz and point out the mistake to you, so then you correct it to 80% and expect Moodle to automatically fix the completion state for students who already got between 80 and 90%.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by David Fountain -

Sounds like the answer is 'it depends'...so should it be something on which parameters can be set. For example setting the dates between which attempts should be re-assessed so you can apply (and explain) your changes to the current cohort of students but not alter that of previous years.

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In reply to David Fountain

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Hubert Chathi -

I agree.  You can come up with situations where the teacher would want either case, so you can't satisfy everyone, all the time.  So IMHO the question shouldn't be "which one do we do?", but rather "how to we accomodate both?"  A couple options are:

  • when the teacher sets the completion criteria, ask them what they want to do with students who have already completed.  This could just be a simple checkbox (or dropdown select -- see below) on the same form.  (And, of course, if nobody has completed yet, then the teacher shouldn't be prompted.)
  • leaving everyone's completion status as-is, but providing a tool that displays all the students whose completion status doesn't match the current completion criteria, and allowing the teacher to select the students to reassess the completion status.

IMHO, the best might be a combination of both: when the teacher sets the completion criteria, provide them with three options: leave everyone alone, reassess everyone, or allow them to select the students to reassess.

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In reply to Hubert Chathi

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Hubert, good post.

However, the scary bit is that it is not just a case of "when the teacher sets the completion criteria ..." It might be

  • When the teacher changes the passing grade for a grade item in the gradebook;
  • When the teacher edits some activity settings;
  • When the teacher deletes a quiz attempt;
  • When the taecher adds a group override to a quiz;
  • ...
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Ray Morris -

That's true, Tim.  Providing three options regarding completion retroactivity for every possible action doesn't seem plausible.  It seems to me we need a default policy one way or the other.

 

Of the two choices we have for a default policy, not being retroactive could be called "sometimes inconvenient", in case that's what a teacher was expecting.

On the other hand, making it retroactive seems severely broken in many cases.  For just one example from my personal experience, making it retroactive could send me to jail for a year. Working as a PI without passing the required classes and staying up with continuing education is a crime.  If I took the class and later the teacher changed the requirements and the system retroactively failed me, that would make me a criminal.

So we choose between "occasionally inconvenient" versus "criminally liable".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Opinions - should changing setting (ie passing grade) retroactively affect students who already completed?

by Per Ekström -

Yes, this is a very real use case, but, I'd like to make the argument that you could solve that problem without adding retroactivity. I believe that if you add in retroactivity, you're opening a whole can of worms best left unopened.

In this particular case I'd add in a tool to manually adjust a grade, which sends out a mandatory notice to the student that his grade has been changed for a certain reason. Of course, that's just my solution to it, others are certainly possible. smile

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