The Gradebook seems to be one of the most daunting parts of Moodle for users (even experienced ones), so anything to make it a bit easier and less error prone would be good.

I particularly like the idea of the scrolling and searching enhancements. Gradebook becomes a real dog is you have either/or loads of activities or loads of users.

Every change listed below should be at least administratively optional.

This way Moodle doesn't have to change unless the admin wants it to.

I cannot stress this enough.

Wish List for Phase 1:

LSU Moodle Gradebook Changes

Everything except extra credit is an administrative option. If you don;t want extra credit in WM, don't add it.

1. Extra credit support in the weighted mean aggregation method.

   1. This makes adding extra credit to weighted mean far simpler than creating the WM category within a SUM category and adding the extra credit item to the SUM category as a sibling to the WM category.

2. Repeat headers in grader report.

   1. User adjustable repeat item/category headers every N rows.

3. Quick-edit inclusion and integration in the grader report.

   1. Edit all student grades for a single item.

   2. Edit all grades for a single user.

   3. Allow for bulk grading.

      1. Insert x for empty or all students for easy homework and attendance grading.

   4. Quickly override, un-override, exempt, or un-exempt any number of grades.

4. Category limited anonymous grading.

   1. This requires quick edit.

   2. Grade by profile field assigned anonymous numbers.

   3. Allows for anonymous offline assignments.

   4. Deny editing in grader report.

5. Gradebook builder inclusion and support for all core mods that support grading.

   1. Quickly build very complex gradebooks.

   2. Syllabus based course creation.

   3. Gradebook template reuse.

6. Fix for letter grade limitations.

   1. Fixed or editable letters for the ultimate in flexibility.

      1. If a school uses a fixed letter grade scale (example: A,B,C,D,F), the admin could lock these in to simplify the grade submission and SIS integration process.

   2. Letter grade assignment based on decimal preferences of the instructor.

      1. This is a bug fix more than a new feature. Currently there is a disparity between what numerical grade a student sees with what letter grade they receive in some cases. This fix alleviates this problem.

   3. Floating point letter grade boundaries.

      1. Faculty can enjoy the flexibility of assigning a floating point grade boundary instead of fixed integer boundaries for grades.

7. Manual item recompute.

   1. Make manual grades work like every other grade in Moodle.

   2. Allows for multiplicator and offset to function as they do everywhere else in Moodle.

8. Unweighted extra credit.

   1. The weighting of extra credit does not make sense to a large portion of users. It seems this needs to make its way into core if weighted mean makes it into core, this option should be available for WM extra credit as well. We use one setting for both.

9. Course category override lockout.

   1. Disable the ability to override course category totals in the grader report and quick edit.

      1. A very large portion of support requests from throughout the world are related to faculty overriding a category grade in quick grading mode. Even in standard editing mode, it is far too easy to override a category total, only to have a student complain later when it does not update when new items are added or graded.

10. Drop lowest limiting.

    1. Do not drop a grade until the number of grades is larger than the drop lowest amount.

       1. This is more a bug fix than a new feature. Currently if a student has two grades out of five (beginning of the semester) and the teacher has drop lowest 2 set, the student has a 0 in the class. This makes no sense at all.

11. Text input instead of dropdowns where necessary.

    1. Drop lowest

    2. Keep highest

    3. Maximum grade

Wish List for Phase 2:

1. Create a new grader report based on a table fully implemented in JS for easy horizontal and vertical scrollbar support instead of the HORRIBLE methods already out there.

   1. This would include all usability enhancements above as well as outlined below.

   2. This will function in editing mode as well.

2. Option for admins to lock editing of mod-graded items in the grade book and have the grade book item link to the mod grading area.

   1. This would greatly alleviate override problems. Ideally, this should allow the user to enter grades right there and update the appropriate mod, but this might not be easily possible before phase 3.

3. Grade history report for viewing of grades at a specific date in time. Alternatively should provide a method for looking up grades changed by a specific person.

4. A simple way to collapse (hide) grader report columns that is sticky. This should have some sort of column visibility control panel that itself can be hidden or shown.

5. Make sure faculty know when they’re leaving the grader report in editing mode that grades have been changed and they have not saved.

6. A better grader report filtering system to not only filter by user information, but grade scores, grade items, improvement, etcetera.

7. JIT tooltips in grader report.

8. Create another grader report that allows faculty to ONLY GRADE items. Like our quick edit, but more transparent. Maybe quick edit could evolve into this?

9. Stop all the drop/keep/exclude/hide trash in SUM and let SUM actually work the way it was intended. It currently does not work as intended and needs to be fixed.
10. Add a new aggregation method that works as SUM is supposed to. Base this off Simple Weighted Mean and give it the automatic category total max updating that SUM has.

Wish List for Phase 3:

1. Completely strip all grade book code from Moodle itself and implement a system grade book that accepts new types of plugins.

   1. All current grade book functionality would be retained within the system grade book plugin.

   2. The grade book system plugin would accept multiple plugin types.

      1. User grade books are sub plugins that define the user interface for the system grade book.

         1. These user grade books can be assigned per category, per course, or per user.

         2. These plugins merely modify the interface a user is presented with when EDITING their grade book.

      2. Aggregation methods would be implemented as sub plugins to ease the creation of new agg methods.

         1. Administrators choose which agg methods are supported site-wide.

      3. All other standard Moodle grade book plugins would be supported.

   3. All modules which include grading functionality would be encouraged to not store grades at all use the provided system grade book functionality.

      1. Within a period of time, it will be required for all mods that grade to not include final grades in their system, instead to use the functionality provided by the system grade book.

Phase 1 Status

1.1-1.11.2 done. Available here: https://github.com/lsuits/moodle

1.11.3 needs attention, but this is can be an ongoing project.

Phase 2 Status

2.1 Is a decent sized project. Creating a whole new report with all the included enhancements, usability testing, and cross browser support is a bit of work.

2.2 should be quick and simple. We already do this for anonymous grades, we can easily add a check to also see if it’s a grade type of mod and lock it too.

2.3 is again a decent sized project. The University of Canberra and Moodle.org has started on this.

2.4 is again a simple (ish) project. I haven’t begun scoping of investigating the feasibility of this one.

2.5 is a joke and is implemented elsewhere in Moodle.

2.6 should be quick. We already do initial bar filtering. I’d love to see lower/greater than grade filtering in it as well.

2.7 needs more investigation.

2.8 could be based on quick edit and if so, it’s already almost done.

2.9 is a quick fix that ignores all the non-working stuff if you are within a SUM category.

2.10 has been done by someone out there. Please chime in if you've done this. UMN maybe?

Phase 3 Status

Phase 3 is huge. I haven’t even begun to start scoping this beyond a basic brain vomit.

The proposed enhancements:

• A report which exposes the Grade History
  This would be nice. The attached design looks a bit complicated, but would definitely work. Why allow folks to promote an old grade or edit within the interface at all? I imagined it as something informational where you could look up grades for the entire course for a given time or view all grade changes for a single person or item since creation. I'd also like it to be able to look up all grades changed by a single person. 
• A horizontal scroll at the top of the Gradebook
  Adding a scrollbar (tracking scrollbar position and updating the real scrollbar) has been done by several folks, why not just use theirs? I've also never found one that works half decently, maybe that's why.
• A simple firstname/lastname search/filter
  We've implemented an initial bar. I'd love to search by first or last name as well as by lower or upper grade boundaries.
• A warning if a teacher is using quick grading and tries to move away from the gradebook without saving
  Please implement one of the many solutions floating out there. I see you've mentioned on in the design specification.

While we finally have some serious thought about the grade book, I need to add the need to start looking at letting the grade book escape the boundaries of the course. As we move forward in online education at a rate that quite overwhelming, there is one focus that is clearly pushing its way forward and that is student focused learning.  Students need to be able to access their grades in one place not by jumping into each course.  And mentors or other roles that are set up with the same kind of functionality need to be able to pull grade reports for a student that span all courses.

As for the other topics mentioned here, LSU has a hugely improved grade book for many years and I have yet to meet a grade book user (at least in the US) that does not want what they already have.  Some things are so basic such as the horizontal scrollbar but the quick edit for a whole column or across all of a student's grades is huge (love the plugin Robert, thanks!).  Overall the grade book is functional but "millions of users are happy"????  I would argue that millions of users make it work, but few are actually happy with it.  Let's remember that it is teachers that primarily use the grade book and we need to make it as user friendly as possible.  Tim has a thread going in the forums https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=242554 that has a lot of great points and makes for a excellent to a wish list and hopefully a road map.

Do away with aggregations (totally NOT understood by anyone outside a math-related field).  To do it:

1. remove all aggregations except Sum of grades
2. Remove the aggregation method column altogether
3. Fix Sum of grades so it excludes ungraded items (University of Minnesota has already done this)
4. Provide a column in the Cats and items page to allow the 'natural' weight of items/ categories to be overridden. The natural weight of an item is its proportional relationship with all other items in its container (category).

If this were done the following would occur:

1. Fully a third of the gradebook code could be removed, greatly simplifying the codebase
2. A majority of instructors would begin to actually understand the gradebook
3. Numerous issues mentioned in this thread would be resolved.

This would handle all but the utter-most edge cases

One other comment I'd like to inject is that the gradebook becomes increasingly more important as learning analytics marches onto the scene. We have a high incidence of use of our gradebook (65% of active Moodle site without an administrative mandate) because it fits the instructors' needs which enables us to capture a lot of early warning information to increase student success rate.