I am hiding the quiz activities on the main course grade. This also hides the quiz grade in the grade book. In the grade book, there isn't an eye to open the grade. How can I unhide the grade in the grade book? I am using Moodle 2.4.4
In M2.4 the grade display of quizzes is controlled in the Activity Settings of a quiz.
However, I think something got broken after implementation of MDL-18301 and MDL-31487.
I cannot make the Quiz Activity hidden, but let the grade show in the gradebook for it.
Tested on 2.5.2
How it should work (Doris, is may still work for you in 2.4.4):
- Go to Quiz activity Settings.
- Locate "Review options" area.
- There are 4 possible states for 'Marks" (grades)
- If they are checked properly, then the Grade for the quiz should be shown to a student in the Gradebook. Even though the activity itself is hidden on the course homepage.
However, what is happening:
- Quiz activity is not visible on the course homepage
- Quiz grade item (column) is visible to a student in the gradebook, being greyed out.
- Quiz grade itself is not shown in the gradebook
If someone has 2.4.6 or 2.5.2 - can you please confirm, and I can report a bug?
thank you
The way it should work is:
- If the quiz (or other activity) is hidden on the course page, then it will not show up in the gradebook.
- If the quiz is visible on the course page but the grades are hidden within the quiz, then the quiz will show up in the gradebook, with the grade hidden.
Following recent bug-fixes, I think it does work that way.
Note that there are several reasons why an activity may not show up on the course page.
- activity eye closed
- activity hidden by conditional activities
- activity hidden by 'restrict to group members only'
- activity hidden because the user does not have mod/...:view (Fixed recently. See MDL-40854.)
If you have a situation where what I described as the way it 'should work' is unhelpful, I would be interested to know what that is.
You can test the latest 2.5.x at demo.moodle.net.
Hmm....
"If the quiz (or other activity) is hidden on the course page, then it will not show up in the gradebook."
I think that for the past years we were trying to do the opposite, and separate state of activity (hidden vs not) from its corresponding grade in the gradebook (hidden vs not). e.g MDL-34931
So activity can be hidden on the course homepage, but its grade can still be visible in the gradebook.
On demo.moodle.net it also still works OK with the Assignment or Forum activities.
Those can be hidden with eye on the homepage, but their grade can be made visible in the gradebook to the student.
It is the Quiz that does not show the grade now
It was working pretty well in recent M2 branches if you would set the Quiz settings to hide, but check 'Marks" in the Review Options area, which would show the grade in the gradebook then.
It is a rather common scenario for a a lot of people, imho.
Interesting. MDL-34931 (fixed in 2.3.3) does seem to go in the opposite direction to the changes have have been made to the quiz, starting with MDL-18301 (2.3.2).
The reason that Quiz, etc. on one hand behaves differently from Assignment, Forum, etc. on the other is whether the activity implements FEATURE_CONTROLS_GRADE_VISIBILITY. (Quiz does.)
As far as the OU is concerned, it is a serious bug if the student should not know about a particular activity, but they see it in the gradebook. That is why I have been involved in fixing bugs that allow hidden activities to appear in the gradebook.
Although you say it is a common scenario to hide an activity on the course page but have it visible in the gradebook, I must by having an imagination failure. I cannot think why you would want to do that. Please could you give a specific example or two.
I guess from the number of people who posted and voted in MDL-34931 and quite passionately chatted here, and even from the original qn from Doris above, we can confirm that this is a wanted feature.
It is indeed a bug if a student sees a grade when the instructor does not want him to.
But if a course developer still wants to show the grade, even if the activity is hidden - it should be allowed. Removing such option from the Quiz is a loss of functionality.
The reasons for doing so - I guess I am not the best person to say why exactly, but I know that this is a very common request.
Some people do not want to clutter the course homepage, or they do not want the users to see the course structure, as it can give away things, or may be they want students to be able to review the grades only after the course completion, etc.
I guess I will submit a ticket, and let the people vote/comment
p.s. Please vote - MDL-42337
Allow students to see grades for a hidden quiz in the Gradebook, if explicitly allowed by instructor (Restore functionality)
I don't doubt the passion, or indeed the integrity, of the people who voted for MDL-34931.
What I am looking for is an explanation of why the requested behaviour is a feature, not a bug. (I am a mathematician, I need logic, sorry.) If so many people want this, surely there is one of them who can give a compelling educational scenario where it makes sense.
If you want to hide activities from the main course page, but sill have them accessible to sudents why wouldn't you take one of these approaches:
- Use one of the new multi-page course formats.
- Use mod_subpage
- Use orphaned activites (section 11 of a 10-section course).
Until someone can give my a convincing explanation, I think MDL-42337 should be closed not-a-bug.
My three examples from the note above do sound like valid business reasons to me. Yes, workarounds are ok too, but all other modules allow such behavior without them.
I would appreciate if we can wait for more comments here or in the tracker. (I would still suggest to convert the ticket to "improvement" then, as this was a loss of functionality).
Looking at the first post the question seems to be one of after the student has completed a topic or a activity in the topic, they should be unable to go back, advance always.
That then reduces the problem to completion tracking and, how to handle forcing on. It's not a gradebook issue, if the activity is still visible (eye open) the gradebook shows it.
That I think makes it logical flow, and makes Tim happy.
Just to make sure I am reading the right bit of your post, I think the examples you are referring to are:
"Some people do not want to clutter the course homepage, or they do not want the users to see the course structure, as it can give away things, or may be they want students to be able to review the grades only after the course completion, etc."
I am afraid these are not the sort of examples I was looking for. I was hoping to start with educational goals: "I my students to X because they will learn better that way, hence in my course design I want Y, and in Moodle terms that means hide the activity from students, but have it appear in the gradebook."
You have given some reasons that would fit in the Y slot in that statement, but you have not given me the X that explains why a teacher may want that. Unless we know X, we don't know if the particular Y is the best solution to that educational problem.
Hi Tim -
If I am reading what you are saying accurately, you are asking Elena to argue why a particular feature, which did work one way and now works a completely different way, should be allowed based on whether they will learn better? Is that correct?
I think I understand what she is saying... She is suggesting that course designers may want to hide activities from the general course display after those activities have been completed. But, since they have grades, and those grades also have a visibility control, then setting the grade visibility to visible, should allow those grades to still be seen.
Since both the course and the grade have visibility settings, this seems perfectly logical to me. And since apparently every activity but the quiz work that way, it would seem that the quiz is the exception.
So in logic terms:
- Activity visible / grade hidden - student can see activity but not the grade.
- Activity hidden / grade visible - student cannot see the activity but can see the grade.
- Activity hidden / grade hidden - student cannot see either the activity nor the grade.
- Activity visible / grade visible - student can see both the activity and the grade.
That seems to make the most sense to me.
What am I not understanding? (And I am quite prepared to have missed something here...;) )
mike
You write as if, before MDL-18301 etc. were fixed, everything in the gradebook worked in a consistent, explicable and bug-free way. And we then changed it.
Would that were true.
These areas of the gradebook have been buggy and inconsistent since they were written. In MDL-18301 Fred at HQ, with input from me and others, took a step in what we believed was the right direction to try to make things better. Subsequent fixes by me followed in that directly.
Sadly, in parallel, Andrew Davis from Moodle HQ fixed MDL-34931, taking a step he believed was the right direction, but in a direction that was different from the other one.
As above, the scope of the two incosistent changes is related to the FEATURE_CONTROLS_GRADE_VISIBILITY flag that each activity chooses whether to set.
So, it seems we still have a bloody mess in the gradebook.
Before we change things further, it would be good to get some sort of consistent overview of how things should work. To do that we need to get to people's real requirements, not just how they used to do things to cope with a buggy system. Hence I am asking probing questions.
I will repeat one of the OU's major requirements: "As far as the OU is concerned, it is a serious bug if the student should not know about a particular activity, but they see it in the gradebook."
The rest of your proposal "Since both the course and the grade have visibility settings ..." is founded on a misconception. If those were the only things we had to worry about this would have been solved long ago. Re-read my post above. Clearly there is more than course_modules.visible to worry about on the activity side (and before I ignored things like review options in the quiz). Also, on the gradebook side, grade_item visibility is not just a boolean flag.
It is great you want to help improve matters, but as long as you think this is simple, you do not understand the problem. Sadly there is not a nice summary of all the issues. The only way to find out is to read a lot of tracker issues, and probably code.
(I don't think anyone understands all the issues. Petr was closest before he took a vow to never touch the gradebook again. I know quite a lot, but certainly not all. I just fix bugs when the OU requries it of me. Andrew Davis is theoretically Gradebook maintainer, but he does not get to work on it full-time at HQ. The CLAMP folks have done as much work on the gradebook as anyone, but I don't know how far into the internals they have got.)
Just in case - I will try one more time to talk about why.
This is a rather common business requirement: allow users to see their transcript information with grades and feedback without seeing/accessing the real activity.
I have worked both on academic and business LMSes. The requirement that I was getting - once students complete the activity - the grade/feedback should stay visible on their transcript (since this is a part of their user record), even if the activity itself is hidden, updated to a new version, or even removed completely.
p.s. I know that the last one (grades for removed items) is a completely new functionality achievable with add-ons, so I am not even going there.
If we say that this is way too complicated to program, we can indeed revert back to 1.9 schema where seeing grade for hidden activities was not possible. Which is unfortunate, but what can we do. I wish I had another major
Hi Tim -
I believe you that it is a complex issue. I took your challenge as one to explain it in simpler terms so that we could decide what the right solution is. So to that end, I believe what I posted makes sense. Using the activity visibility and grade visibility settings, provide the following scenarions:
- Activity visible / grade hidden - student can see activity but not the grade.
- Activity hidden / grade visible - student cannot see the activity but can see the grade.
- Activity hidden / grade hidden - student cannot see either the activity nor the grade.
- Activity visible / grade visible - student can see both the activity and the grade.
I believe this would meet all of the defined needs I have read. The OU would use the third setting to ensure that the activity and the grade are not seen.
In "Moodle-speak", "student" really means "user with the capability to view those items".
mike
You think we should completely hide our quizzes from students when we don't want them to see the scores?
In a word: No.
That does not meet our requirements.
Hi Tim -
If you don't want them to see the scores, would you not hide the grades and leave the activity visible? I'm pretty sure I'm still not seeing/understanding the issue you are describing...
I'm also concerned that the one different use-case that the OU has is driving how a core Moodle activity behaves. I realize you represent the OU primarily, but shouldn't a Moodle activity behave the way Moodle needs it to? Again, I may be misunderstanding, but if the other Moodle activities allow the activity to be hidden in the course, but the grades to be visible, shouldn't the quiz allow this too?
But if in fact the other activities are inconsistent in their behaviour this way, then I guess we need to address this behaviour at a general level first.
mike
Hi - I was just reading through this thread of messages with the original intent of finding out how to hide a quiz from my activities but keep it in the grade book.
All the questions about why someone would ever want to do that have motivated me to respond, as that is exactly what I want to do. And, the answer is simple. I use the quizzes as an easy way to engage student discussion with the benefit of a few extra points to their grade. The quiz, in this case, is really a survey. The answers matter to me, not necessarily the students. The grades for completing the quizzes, on the other hand, matter to the students. So, there really is no need to have it as an activity since they aren't going to review their answers, just in the grade book.
I am no moodle expert, so perhaps using a quiz to do this is the most backwards way of doing things. But, at the time it seemed like the easiest. If only you could control its visibility behaviors.
OK, so this is clearly a thing that people do. Thank you all for explaining it to me. It really would not have occurred to me that was something people wanted to do, and now I know, I can take it into consideration in future.
I have to say though, the educator in my is shuddering a bit at the idea of hiding quizzes after the student has done them. I mean, I completely get the desire to move the acticity out of the way once the student has done it, so they can concentrate on the next thing. But to hide it completely? Surely there is value in the students having the possibiltiy to review their responses later, even if not all of them will. Don't we want our students to develop the good practices of reflective learners?
So, I still think the preferred way to do this is to put a section at the bottom of your course page "Completed activities" and move the quizzes there, rather then hiding them completely.
A lot of teachers like to hide the previous week's sections just to clean the page as well. I could also see where a final quiz might be a conglomerate of earlier quizzes and a teacher might not want her students going back to look at the questions. (I know, why not?, but I am sure they have their reasons!!).
Whatever their preference, it does not make sense that the quiz module is the only thing that does not allow a grade to show for a hidden activity.
<snip>I have to say though, the educator in my is shuddering a bit at the idea of hiding quizzes after the student has done them. I mean, I completely get the desire to move the activity out of the way once the student has done it, so they can concentrate on the next thing. But to hide it completely? Surely there is value in the students having the possibility to review their responses later, even if not all of them will. Don't we want our students to develop the good practices of reflective learners?</snip>
Yes, we do, but in the case of certification or pre-certification exams such as used in Nursing classes (and I have used in Networking classes) we don't want pools of questions being distributed to other students. We have this issue, and we have instructors who want students to go back over the quiz and they will allow the student to see the correct answer and they put in tons of feedback about right and wrong answers, and it works for them. But there are also instructors who are giving quizzes where unless a student gets the answer correct, they don't see the correct answer, the instructors will allow student access to review for a brief period of time, then they don't want students to build banks of questions to pass along to future classes, or to save for final exams. I used Nursing as an example, they are required for accreditation to report how students do on specific concepts, down to the question level, so they can't have students sharing the questions. We also have math instructors who use quizzes for homework assignments, and they don't necessarily want all the answers floating around at exam time. We also have an institutional policy that students can keep track of their grades in Moodle.
We would really like to see the eye back in the Categories and Items view for quizzes, it's still there for discussions and assignments.
Hello Tim,
I am using the moodle 2.9. I want to quizz or other activity mod hide to student but it still show in gradebook.
Because My teacher want to input results of paper test. He don't want his student see the activity.
Do you have help me to complete the problem.
Thanks
In reply to Manh VU
Re: Trả lời: Re: Quiz grade in grade book hidden from students
by Emma Richardson -
In the gradebook, there is the option to hide the grade as well.
In reply to Emma Richardson
Re: Trả lời: Re: Quiz grade in grade book hidden from students
by Daniel Zarrella -
I have the same issue. If the quiz is hidden the students cannot see the grade. We are currently using moodle 2.9.
Is there a setting where the students can see the grade even though the quiz is hidden?
Thank you!
In reply to Emma Richardson
Trả lời: Re: Trả lời: Re: Quiz grade in grade book hidden from students
by Manh VU -
Hello,
I am very ice to see your reply. that I mean I want to hide activity, grade item display in gradebook.
Thank.
I found this link because I had exactly the same problem as other posters: I wanted to have a gradebook item visible when the underlying Moodle activity was hidden. I can do this in 2.3 but not (as far as I can see) in 2.6. I won't bother with justifying why I want to do this - other posters have covered this thoroughly. I'd just like to make two additional points that I think are relevant:
Jenny
- The 2.6 documentation gives the impression that the situation is exactly as those of us wanting to be able separate activity hiding and gradebook item hiding want: "In the context of the gradebook hiding is completely separate from the show/hide in the main course page, where the activities are shown/hidden" (http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/Grade_hiding).
- I gather from Tim Hunt's posts that the change in the relationship of hidden activities and their associated gradebook items was at least partly to avoid a situation where student could see an item in the gradebook but be unaware of the activity. My view of that is that teachers on Moodle sites can, if they do not know what they are doing, do many many things that confuse students. Most us us manage to avoid that most of the time, by knowing what we are doing and thinking things through. Tim's argument seems to be to be undermined by the fact that I can quite easily, if I am not able to understand the way the gradebook works from a student point of view, create a manual gradebook item which is visible to the students even though they don't know about it. Should we stop allowing manual gradebook items just in case people do that? No: give people flexibilty and let them use it intelligently (or get complaints from students if they do not).
Jenny
I am also currently investigating this issue as I have an instructor who wishes to hide her quizzes once they are complete (along with all the other content of that section) while still allowing the students to see the final grades in the gradebook. The difference in my situation is that this behavior IS happening by default except for one case, which is why I'm investigating ....very very odd. We are using 2.4.7 and have quizzes appearing for students along with the corresponding score in the gradebook and they are clearly hidden on the home page.
This is an interesting discussion and I actually agree with Tim that the default should be that if the quiz is hidden it should NOT be seen in the gradebook. An instructor who works mainly on the home page with course activities would expect this behavior, no?
At the same time, I understand the need to 'remove' it from the home page while allowing it to be viewable in the gradebook (as we have recently found out via the needs of one of our instructors) so it would be nice to at least have the capability built in for those that might find this useful - which seem to be a lot ...
And considering Moodle is used so many different ways with so many different options to satisfy so many different needs ... why not. The workarounds Tim indicated seem viable enough although a couple involve installing 3rd party modules which is not always desirable to those of us who want to stick to core as much as we can to avoid a possibly unmaintained module in the future. Moving items to an orphaned section will do the trick but then you are gradually changing your course site structure and will have to put it all back together again afterward. It seems logical to have some sort of solution to easily hide fully graded activities on the home page will retaining the 'grade book' data for students.
I hide quizzes after the due date has expired because it makes the page very long to keep all the quizzes visible and students don't seem to read the directions so they try to take quizzes that have closed instead of the ones that are open. By only showing the quizzes that are open I cut down on student mistakes (and the excuse I tried to take the quiz before it was due but it wouldn't open - because they were trying an old quiz). I need students to be able to see the quiz grades in the gradebook even if I closed to quiz from view. This has very much harmed my classes.
We use quizzes for end of course exams.
We also have students starting and finishing courses at any time, so there is no 'exam time'.
We were hiding the end of course exam on the course page, but leaving the grade visible in the gradebook so students could see their grade.
We hide the end of course exam on the course page for security reasons. We also have a password on it, but being able to hide it after an exam session meant we didn't have to change the password immediately after the session.
We can change our policy to leave the quiz visible and change the password after a session instead of before.
The main pain seems to be that a quiz grade was hidden in the gradebook when we went from 2.4 to 2.5 and now I can't see a way to make the grade visible in the gradebook.