Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Elizabeth Dalton -
Number of replies: 7

On this page:

https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Upgrading#Possible_issues_that_may_affect_you_in_Moodle_2.8

I see:

"Any courses previously using either 'Sum of grades' and/or 'Aggregate including subcategories' may have some changes to grades. Thus it is recommended that grades in the gradebook are reviewed for such courses."

Unfortunately, I missed this notation until last week, when it was pointed out to me in the Moodle Gradebook Working Group.

This has caused significant concern in our organization and we have postponed upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 during our only immediate window of opportunity (the week of March 29-April 4). Our next window will be June 28 to July 4, so now we are risking a security bug being discovered between May 11, when 2.6 is EOL, and June 28. Before that time, we need to understand what the impact of this change is expected to be and how we can mitigate it. While Moodle is not our system of record for grades, it is a reference system in the case of grade challenges, and in some cases students continue to access courses past the end of the term. We run 4 terms per year with very little "down time" between them, usually only 1 week. With hundreds of courses running each term and about 20 courses with up to 30 students in each known to be using "Sum of grades" aggregation, we can't ask our instructors to go back and inspect courses from prior terms to determine whether the individual grades have changed.

How are other institutions handling this? Someone suggested to me that we could lock the grades from courses prior to the upgrade, but there isn't, so far as I know, a feature in Moodle to do this, so we would have to get permission from our hosting provider to run a SQL script, which we would also have to write and test.

I am really quite surprised that the decision was made at Moodle HQ to replace "Sum of grades" with a new aggregation expected to alter the grades of some previous courses, rather than deprecating "Sum of grades" but keeping the historical calculation/aggregation method in place. Similarly, I am surprised that the column storing the "Aggregate including subcategories" function was removed from the database, rather than simply removing that feature from the GUI.

On the other hand, I wrote a query using Configurable Reports and I see very few cases in which final grades are actually altered between the two aggregation methods.

What, specifically, is supposed to trigger a change? Is there a more specific query I can use to identify affected courses?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Elizabeth Dalton

Granite State College

In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Jason Touw -

Elizabeth,

We did that exact upgrade in October.  The gradebook was a disaster.  I use sum of grades and the issue was that we had a glitch where the totals were not being added up properly.  To make matters worse, the checkbox for "Aggregate non-empty grades" did not work consistently, for some students it did, others it didn't...The excluded feature which is not supposed to work in Sum of Grades did in fact alter the totals for some and not others...and about 35% of students could no longer see their grades (we have it turned on in admin so students can see their gradebook).  So I tried to switch to "Simple weighted mean of grades" and still a disaster.

When I would try to update grades or add items, I would get "Error 505 - file not found" all over the place...links had to be re-established between pages and user IDs...it was a disaster.  For anyone using the gradebook, I would not recommend the upgrade to 2.8 in the middle of the class...wait til it is over if at all possible.  Other modules and features outside of gradebook seem to be relatively unaffected with the exception of Chat and Quiz which occassionally freeze up which requires the user to close the window and reopen it.

How did I fix my gradebook?  Well I have one full year course and so we still have bugs...I had to calculate second quarter grades for my AP class manually for 10 students out of 30...and now I have to weight the final averages manually because the bugs are still in it with the totals the first two quarters. The remainder of my courses are half year, so when we started over February 1 with a fresh course, the bugs disappeared and the new gradebook seems to be more accurate than the old gradebook in 2.6.2.  I have had no issues with my new courses.

In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Bob Puffer -

The Sum of grades issue you raise has many tendrils. Sum of grades previous to 2.8 was broken (we turned it off). With it you could choose aggregate only non-empty grades but it wouldn't work. Philosophies vary as to whether this is a bug or a feature. My opinion and that of the gradebook working group is that it was a bug. Its true that fixing the bug may cause some grade changes but I don't think not fixing it would be a good resort.

I'd be interested in the use case or pedagogical argument for using Sum of grades but not wanting it to exclude empty grades. Naturally this would only matter if letter grades or percentage grades were displayed.

In reply to Bob Puffer

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Jason Touw -

I agree with you Bob, that I do not know why you would not want to exclude empty grades.  I choose to exclude empty grades in my calculations.  If a zero is warranted, I enter the "0" so that it is included in the calculation.

In reply to Bob Puffer

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Elizabeth Dalton -

I agree that the old "Sum of grades" was buggy. I disagree that the correct solution was to change previous calculations. We did not realize that it was so severely broken until recently, so we allowed faculty to use it and they made their own adjustments or accommodations until they and their students were satisfied with the grades as calculated. If we perform this upgrade and it alters calculations for prior courses, we open ourselves up to a slew of grade challenges from students, and we massively weaken confidence in the gradebook accuracy in general.

We are happy to accept that the old calculation method will not be available going forward. I am considering asking faculty to stop using it for our Spring 2015 term (starting at the end of next week) and subsequent terms. But a system upgrade should not, in my mind, change historical data, which is what this effectively does.

Rather than defaulting to changing the prior calculation and presenting a message to the instructor that this has been done, I would prefer that the instructor sees a message notifying them that the aggregation method used has been deprecated, and that they can convert to the new aggregation method if they agree... with an option to preview and cancel the conversion. I would combine that with the ability to remove permissions to select the old aggregation method going forward.

If this cannot be changed for 2.8, can this possibly be addressed for 2.9? We would then wait to upgrade to that version.

In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Bob Puffer -

There are a number of schools examining the impact of this and determining a strategy for remedy. When I hear from them I will post the information to this forum.

In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Trevor Jones -
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Hi Elizabeth,

At the University of Alberta we're facing the same issue and I agree whole heartedly with your disagreement to the approach taken with this upgrade.
I'm currently working on our upgrade plan, and I thought I'd share what I've come up with so far.

The approach I'm investigating right now is a multi-vector one:

  1. Communicate and work with instructors of live running courses to change their gradebook calculations, in order to minimize the number of affected 'live' courses, specifically if they fall into either of the two affected groups:
    1. Use of the "Sum of grades" with aggregate non-empty grades or any other incompatible settings if they exist.
    2. Use of sub category aggregation.
  2. Disable the grade_item update that marks the 'affected' grades as needing updating. But leaving the notification for all the affected courses.
  3. Change the lang string for the 'aggregatesubcatsupgradedgrades' and 'sumofgradesupgradedgrades' in 'grade' to messages explaining that any modification to the grade items in the course could cause possible final grade changes.
  4. Lastly move all completed courses into a new 'read-only' category where permissions to make changes to the courses by instructor or students is removed.

Some of this may only apply to our specific situation/configuration, and we haven't actually tested any of this to see the workflow or if it works... But, I welcome any comments, alternative/additional ideas, or criticisms.

I'll attach the two line patch for disabling the grade_item changes.

Cheers


In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Will upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 change final grade calculations in existing courses?

by Ziyad Muslat -

Our computer services installed a development moodle server for us to test and one of these gradebook issues were there except may be for the sub categories aggregation.  however, when they upgraded the production server, all these issues suddenly showed up and it is the grades submission season. Since I'm the gradebook expert in my team, I had to deal with flooding complaints about these issue.

My quick fix was to:

1. export the grades into an excel sheet

2. delete the existing grades items in moodle

3. recreate these item and categories

4. Import the grades back.

This approach, even though it is very time consuming, but it made gradebook for the courses work again.

The problem seems to be with gradebooks that were created before the upgrade (we were using moodle 2.6.2).

the reason that made me recreate these items is that  in our moodle 2.8.3 installation, grade items and categories that had a maximum grade different than 100, the gradebook was still calculating them as out of a 100.

I also noticed the "natural" method is not really summing the grades. It is still using the weighting method, but uses the maximum grades for the grades items as weights adjusted to 100.

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